


i guess all my good graces (are too far out of reach)

by annnubis



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Body Horror, Child Abuse, Good Babysitter Steve Harrington, M/M, Monsters, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Smart Billy Hargrove, at everything else, billy knows what he wants but he's shit, from anyone, high school is a vat of existential dread bummer, so many self esteem issues even i'm rolling my eyes, steve has never felt this kind of attention
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 09:16:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 49,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19270276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annnubis/pseuds/annnubis
Summary: Billy didn't know it was possible to look at another person and feel the world narrow to a single pinprick of light. He thought he'd survive high school with only a couple broken bones and minimal scarring, but then he moved to Hawkins, Indiana. He knows he's the monster in the story, but Steve Harrington keeps looking at him like he's a real person.Or: Billy Hargrove accidentally starts trying and there's something deeply wrong with Tommy.





	1. whirling in the dark universe

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from "Thin Line" by honeyhoney. Chapter title comes from "The Empty Glass" by Louise Glück. Billy and Steve kept showing up on my tumblr dash and I kept ignoring them because I am a sucker for electric blue eyes and low sweet voices that only say cruel things. Not to mention...just like everything Steve Harrington has going on with his jerk redemption arc.

Billy loved his chucks, beat to shit and scuffed as they were, and he swore he played basketball better with them on. It felt good to wear them. Safe. It was something about him his father never commented on.

He’d found a decent pair at a Salvation Army in California months before they moved, used but not wrecked. Billy didn’t know why the fuck someone would give up a good pair of shoes, but he didn’t bother to feel anything except for a healthy dose of disdain for the fucking idiot.

There were a lot of things Billy had to keep separate from his life as Billy Hargrove, person in the world, and Billy Hargrove, fuck-up son who needed to be nailed to the goddamn floor. Billy the person wanted to play basketball and go to parties and wear his $4 Converse, but Billy the son knew he inevitably had to come home and face whatever music his father saw fit to play.

And by music he meant whatever mood pushed him to the edge that day. Whatever disrespect his dad felt he got from coworkers, whichever way Max’s mom didn’t add up to the perfect 50’s housewife or whatever--all of that was Billy’s job to accept as his fault.

Home was exhausting, covered in barbed wire that cut into him every time he walked into the wrong room at the wrong time.

So coming home after school that day in March with his used Converse on his feet and his taped-up sneakers in a trashcan can had been nerve-wracking. But his father had examined him up and down and returned his indifferent gaze to his newspaper, flicking off some ashes from his cigar into a coaster. Billy remembered clenching his jaw and saying nothing, though the blood in his veins had frozen and completely thawed within the thirty seconds it took for his father took to evaluate and dismiss him.

 _Yes_ , he’d thought, _fuck yes_. _Mine._

Pure elation. Something he liked wasn’t about to be taken away from him just because he wanted it. His dad hadn't paid for them since he'd gotten a job at the burger place in town. Flipping patties meant he'd been able to afford the shoes along with a couple button-down shirts and jeans people who’d gained winter weight couldn’t wear any longer and left in the donation box. His father shouldn't have shit to say no matter what, but that hardly stopped him.

It had turned out to be a godsend, his job and his thrifting. Those clothes and his pair of sneakers, they were getting him through his new boring existence in Bumfuck, Indiana. Where the girls were butterfaces and the boys were sycophantic stand-ins for friends.

Billy couldn’t believe he’d felt any apprehension at all, the first time he drove his Camaro into the high school parking lot, high off adrenaline and half a joint and the belt lashes on his back he’d gotten while Max was out skateboarding sullenly in the neighborhood like the moody brat she was.

He looked around Hawkins and, honestly, all he saw was what he’d seen on the west coast, too: soft, weak bitches. Everyone looked ready to cave in on themselves at the slightest provocation, wanted to keep their heads down and get through the day meek and quiet and protected, as if protection was possible.

The bell rang and, his reverie interrupted, he slung his backpack over one shoulder and left AP Physics in his dust. He enjoyed the sciences, but school dragged on and on as he'd waited and failed to catch a glimpse of Hawkins' Once and Future King. He wanted to have a little talk in the wake of the absolute mind fuck that was last weekend. And he wanted to see for himself the damage he'd done to Steve's face that had been talk of the hallways since homeroom. 

The high school double doors were both wide open as he and the rest of the chattel poured outside. Billy scanned the mass of teenagers until he saw exactly who he was searching for, a figure with a quick pace hastily making a beeline to his car. About to escape Billy's clutches.

“Hey, Harrington,” he yelled across the lot as school let out, grinning wide and looking for all the world like he could be greeting a long lost pal and not the guy he’d nearly put in the hospital a few days ago.

He knew he shouldn't keep pushing. But he'd woken on Sunday morning with the taste of subjugation at the hands of a middle schooler still bitter on his tongue, a car that had mysteriously appeared battered and empty in his driveway, and him with sore, drugged muscles tucked haphazardly in his bed. And now the only interesting person he’d met since they’d moved here who was involved with some clearly strange happenings was in front of him and close enough to touch and he couldn't turn his back. Couldn't ignore it or pretend everything was positively hunky dory. It wasn't him.

He wasn't the type to walk away from anything.

As he got closer, he noticed Steve had stopped walking towards his car, but hadn't turned around to face him. From the back, he saw a skinny kid with dark hair and big hands loose at his side. Not even bracing himself.

Not even after last weekend, when Billy had finally broken him a bit. It lit something in him, unnameable and dark and awed. That someone could feel all the impact of Billy, horrible as it was, and come out the other side as slender and calm and solid as ever.

“Harrington,” he called, tongue touching his upper lip as he grinned his shit-eating grin, “compadre. Buddy. C’mon, lemme see that pretty face of yours.”

The anger Billy felt just looking at him had subsided since the rage had been purged in the Byers’ shack and the humiliation of having his stepsister threaten him as good as his pops ever had.

And he felt things about Steve, and what he’d done to Steve, a big bundle of things that had never done him any good anyway because his feelings didn’t do shit for him. Hadn’t kept his father’s hands off his throat. Hadn’t miraculously made Susan feel a shred of real compassion for him. Hadn’t kept his mom around.

He just knew he craved the contact he’d had with someone who really saw him when they looked at each other, touched him with purpose because those two cool fingertips pressed against his chest had felt like nothing but the strength of Steve’s will, notably not beating him into submission, just rising up to challenge him like an equal. Standing his ground not even realizing he wasn’t throwing a punch like anyone else in his position would have until Billy put his hands on the Sinclair kid.

Harrington sighed.

“If you want to see your handiwork, just say it,” he said, flat and smooth, turning so that Billy could take a long look at his pulverized eye, his busted nose, the nasty gash on his lip, and the scab climbing into his hairline. Steve’s face was pale with exhaustion and every impact had wrought something massively stark and violet against it. He was a study of youth and sweetness and pain--Billy’s true antithesis: someone who looked like they should never be hit.

Bruises never made Billy’s face look fragile and never inspired worry or concern. They never made him look like he was in pain so much as angry. Feral.

Bruises on Billy’s face made him look like a brute. That’s what people saw when they looked at him.

It’s why his dad didn’t have to pull punches often; because he’d never had to learn to, because people looked at Billy and saw a kid who sought out violence. Who wanted to cause hurt and be hurt. And that’s all there was to it, his golden skin carrying damage like a gladiator’s. Like he was born for a blood sport in an arena.

He shoved the thoughts back and focused on the boy before him, hands still open at his side, stern but serene. His pink bottom lip swollen on the left from a couple good wallops.

Billy leaned into Steve’s space, watching as his brows knit together and his nose scrunched up in disgust. So open.

And always just watching him, thinking, before he responded and how many fucking people in Billy’s life did that? Zero. Nobody spoke to him like they expected him to say anything worth listening to, girls and guys looking at his face and his body and hearing nothing but static every time he opened his mouth. His dad and Susan and Max seeing a piece of shit, just two people watching an animal take chunks out of him daily without doing a fucking thing. Pretending it wasn’t happening.

They could watch him cry, hear him grunt at the collision of flesh on flesh, but he was just some dumb, violent, fucking animal to them. A thing that was too angry, too volatile, to comfort.

But Steve--fuck, Steve _reacted_ to him. Made the air around them feel like it contained no one else, just them, just them calculating what the other person said and what they did and making the next move accordingly.

“Got you good, didn’t I,” Billy said as he inspected Steve’s face, gentle and sly and cutting, “I hope you put some ice on that eye.”

Just like he hoped, Steve took a deep breath and something cooled in his eyes. His expression smoothed and he leaned forward and asked, “At what point did you fucking care when you lost your mind and almost kicked the shit out of a middle schooler?”

And that-- _that_ made his jaw tick.

“One girl at a fucking shack in the middle of the woods surrounded by boys...and you,” he responded with a lethargy that belied the knife his eyes made as he locked them with Steve’s, “Max isn’t my sister, but I’m about all she’s got in this shithole world. And the situation she was in? Harrington, it looked bad.”

Steve looked off to the side as if he were gathering his thoughts, shifted his arms and Billy looked down at his hands again, but this time he had a clear view of his palms and the long runs of his fingers. Those hands were rubbed raw, covered in calluses and busted calluses, ruined like something had stripped off his skin from holding it too long.

 _I didn’t give him those_ , Billy thought. Considering.

“The only person Max was afraid of that night was you,” Steve said simply, “And I don’t know her that well, but it must be a nightmare to live with you so I can’t say I blame her.”

Billy drifted back into fake and easy humor and put a _who-me?_ hand on his chest, feigning surprise as he replied, “I am a joy to behold. Daily. If she can’t relax, that’s not my problem.”

Steve opened his mouth to speak, probably to argue the point, but Billy spoke over him, steamrolling straight into a new subject, “That weekend is a whole lot of blank for me, I’ve gotta be honest. The needle, the bat, the stealing my _fucking_ car. And here you are, looking like you just survived a war. Face fucked up. Hands fucked up. Holding yourself like something kicked you in the ribs…”

Billy got closer, not touching, but too close to ignore.

“You think I can’t figure out when something smells like bullshit? It’s _wafting_ off you, princess,” he added because Steve got a look whenever Billy called him something that could have been sweet but sounded sour. And he hated liars. Even ones who had eyes as dark as the boy in front of him.

But Steve didn’t back down. Didn’t looked particularly cowed or put out. He took a small step back, ruffled his hair like he was thinking hard, but he didn’t disengage. He was still here, giving Billy his time and attention and looking like he might even have answers.

And Billy? Billy wanted them all.

Steve cocked his head to the side, wisps of his bangs falling over his forehead as he moved, and said, “Are you sure you didn’t just have a hard night, Hargrove? After the sedative, you probably started hallucinating. Syringe to the neck must have been rough. You went down like an elephant.”

Billy knows he could live in this moment forever, within an argument reaching beyond all the stupid scripts he’s tired of everyone reading around him because he’s big and angry and handsome, being something to everyone but never himself.

Except for now. Except for Steve.

“You’re lucky my fists are tired from the beating I gave you,” he murmurs, low and crooning, his face leaning into Steve’s face and his breath on Steve’s cheek, “Because I know you’re keeping secrets, Steven, and there’s a dent in my car that looks like you hit someone.”

Steve smelled like cucumbers and melons, green fresh things in neatly arranged bottles in his undoubtedly pristine bathroom. He also smelled like boy and heat and frustration. It was an amalgamation of scents that Billy picked up whenever he got close, like King Steve was always beautiful and clean and a little overwhelmed.

Steve gave a close mouthed smile, staying completely still. Not moving closer, but not moving away.

“Not me.”

“Not you what?”

“I didn’t hit anything. Max was driving,” and then he huffed out an incredulous laugh, like he was thinking back and still in a state of exasperated disbelief about the whole thing.

Billy was going to respond before he noticed Tommy and his slag girlfriend giving him some serious looks from across the parking lot. Two more people who wanted him under their thumb and he just wouldn’t give it to them. He flipped them off with both hands.

When Steve noticed what had grabbed his attention, Billy took the moment to watch Steve watching them. Noticed his jawline and the pink stamp of his lips, the smooth forehead and the slope of his nose. Beneath the remnants of suffering, he made Bottecelli’s Venus look like a misshapen potato.

“Don’t worry about them,” he said, eyes pinned to Steve’s, “They’re bullshit friends and they’re never going to leave this shit town.”

 _Unlike you_ , he didn’t say. _Unlike me_ , went unspoken.

Turning to face Billy fully, for the first time since last weekend, Harrington took his time inspecting him. From Billy’s moussed curls, his feverish eyes, the shirt that stretched across his chest and felt painted on just the way Billy liked it. He took in his black high-tops, the socks above them. Billy felt so terribly, completely seen he swore his heart rate kicked up a notch.

Steve finished his perusal and finally replied, “If that’s all…” and began to walk back to his car like that might be the end of it. Like he could call the shots, make the decision to walk away as if their conversation didn’t matter.

“Matter of fact,” Billy said, “That’s not all it. There’s a house party tonight at Theresa Vestal’s. Come. Find a bitch to fuck.”

“Not a chance,” Steve shot back, “I’ve had enough of Theresa’s shitty jungle juice for a lifetime.”

“What were you even like before this--this _travesty_ of an attitude?” Billy laughed, face splitting into the wide, mean smile that came so naturally, “People whisper about your exploits, Stevie boy. I heard you went apeshit on that virginal nun you used to date after she got with Wheeler. _Where_ _did you go_?”

“Stop,” Steve barked, jaw set, suddenly more out of control than Billy had ever seen him. A gasp caught in his throat at the sight. He wouldn’t let this moment slip by. Where most people walked away, too afraid to pursue past a boundary line marked by anger, well, that’s where he excelled at trampling through with bells on carrying a chainsaw in both hands.

“No,” he insisted, “No, I’m not letting this go. That’s all you count on, isn’t it, Steve? People letting go of who you were. What the fuck happened. Where the fuck _are_ you, really, when you get that blank look on your face?”

Billy thought his knees were going to buckle when Steve backed him up against his BMW which must have been behind him the whole time somehow, not anywhere close to pushing him physically but positively crowding him with his presence. It felt nothing like his father on the knife’s edge of violence; it resembled nothing of the tidal wave of pissing-fear that accompanied his dad’s spittle hitting his cheek.

It lit him up like someone had poured gasoline on his chest and flicked a match at him, burning in his stillness with cool metal at his back and this bruised, battered boy at his front. He thought he might be able to breathe fire just because Steve had torn off a veil, had shed the false skin of cool he tried to wear all the time.

Then Steve let out a big sigh and the electricity of intense emotion seemed to flood out of him. He was still close, but he was reigning himself in. Billy wanted to grab the edge of it and drag it back out, shake it into a tizzy, drink it in long swallows.

Steve shook his head softly, sighing, “Maybe. Maybe I'll go.”

When he heard him, felt the  _fuck-it-whatever_ sentiment and exhaustion packed into that one word, Billy did the first thing that came to mind and barked a laugh. Steve Harrington, a boy who wouldn’t know if Dostoevsky was a Russian dessert or a writer. Steve, who chased behind his ex and her new toy like a lapdog, who Billy realized was _actually_ babysitting those kids last weekend and who he’d watched share his umbrella with their English teacher after she had basically called him a dumbass the day before for not doing any of their assigned readings for _Jane Eyre_. Steve, who got the tar beat out of him when Billy lost his shit and could only see Neil Hargrove on the Byers' shabby wood floor at the mercy of his fists and was still talking to him.

Billy Hargrove laughed, a little cruel and a little shy and possibly with a tiny bit of _relief_ , head falling back against the car behind him.

“Steve Harrington, you are an absolute idiot,” he said, not aware of anything--not if Tommy and Carol were still watching, not if the lot was empty now, not anything except how he was looking at someone, fully awake, and that someone was looking back.


	2. i never changed, inside the glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Billy gets a job at a burger joint, Benny is gruff and kind in a white apron, and a house party gets out of control in a way that has less to do with keg stands and more to do with unexpected possessions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so: Billy and Steve are juniors because reasons, Tommy H's last name is Hader because it felt right, and I brought Benny back to life because I love him and he was such an underutilized character. Just pretend Eleven ate her hamburger and slipped out while Benny went to the bathroom or something and canon resumed from there. The chapter title is from the same Louise Glück poem.

Their house looked, despite his criticisms of the Byers residence, not dissimilar to an outhouse painted yellow that was once vibrant but whose faded color now only accentuated the chipping wood and the dingy gutters. It looked like a place where kids grew up and left their parents to die in, at least to Billy, which would have been fine with him if it meant he never had to sleep beneath its shitty roof.

Instead, his father married a doormat and they had to pack up and leave because as a couple (which made him smile bitterly because _fuck_ if his dad gave a damn about what anyone else thought) they decided Billy needed somewhere calmer to finish school after his expulsion. So they made one big family road trip, smiling cinematically and feeding each other carrot sticks while Mommy Dearest led them with her soprano through the whole  _Sound of Music_ soundtrack and they played the license plate game.

They most _certainly_ didn’t by any means stay at the cheapest motels imaginable while crossing the country. Neil would _never_ make Billy park the Camaro next to the U-Haul-and-hitched-car and then make him sleep in it to make sure no one broke into it. He _didn’t_ make Billy eat chips and moon pies at gas stations while he took his pretty young wife and darling new daughter to the restaurant across the street.

And if he did, it was only because Billy was going too slow or too fast or he didn’t look respectable enough to sit down at a 24-hour diner that only served food with an extra serving of grease on the side.

By the time they’d made it to Hawkins, Billy had cried through at least two states from exhaustion from hardly getting sleep in the driver’s seat of his car at night when everyone else laid on beds behind a locked door dreaming of fucking sugar plums.

He’d felt disgusting, layers of sweat dried on him smelling rank even to him. When he pulled up into the driveway behind his dad, he got out and waited, hoping he wouldn’t be made to unload anything this late.

His father hadn’t even spared him a look as he stepped out of the driver’s seat and said, navigating his way to the front door in the darkness of 11 PM rural Indiana, “Let’s pack it in tonight and start working tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir,” Billy had responded, wiping any emotion from his voice. He didn’t want to mess up his impending shower and night of sleeping on the floor where there wasn't a steering wheel digging into his legs. They could unload the U-Haul tomorrow. That night, he had a date with his shampoo followed immediately by a romp in the sheets with his conditioner.

It had been the best shower of his life possibly and he stood beneath the hot spray of water until Neil pounded on the bathroom door, letting him know the utilities weren't cheap and if he wanted to be an indulgent pussy he’d have to pay for it himself.

That was the first time Neil mentioned him getting a job now that they were in Hawkins, but it wasn't the last. He was pushing for his son to be employed with a reasonable job for a high school student that he could have until graduation. And he'd given Billy the deadline of Christmas for him to be a working man.

It was clear most kids in town didn't have side jobs, but Billy wasn’t opposed, not really. It meant that he could have some disposable income to tuck into savings in case of emergencies. A job meant Billy got to be home less. Be less beholden to the man whose moods struck like lightning wherever he was standing.

Months later, Billy was perusing the morning newspaper classifieds after he gave Max the five minute warning that she better get her ass in gear and in his car before he left her behind. An empty threat, but it made him feel better.

Nothing had caught his eye until that morning, hours before he cornered Steve in the student lot. The listing burning a hole in his pocket read, “Looking for responsible worker for kitchen position. Part-time. Dinner shifts weekdays and at least one weekend day. Come in to apply.”

The classified named the proprietor as Benny Hammond and included an address for a joint called Benny’s Burgers on Randolph Street. It was a straightforward listing and Billy had a good reference from his kitchen job back home. He felt confident he could knock this off his list and then get ready to drink to excess later that night.

He had plans, which hopefully involved Steve Harrington--who'd only just gotten into his car and left without a backward glance. Billy walked across the lot towards his car where Maxine was also just arriving, running late herself. They hadn’t spoken beyond their messed-up version of pleasantries since she’d threatened him and neither seemed willing to talk just yet. Too much had happened to address it easily.

He drove her home in mutual silence, but it grated on him fiercely. Last weekend bothered him; everything about it. Billy didn’t like his stepsister and he was very vocal about it. But he also cared about her and feeling afraid of her had forced him into confronting the way he’d been treating her. How he couldn't help the resentment that pooled in his lungs when he looked at her. How he felt powerful standing over her and how much he hated himself for reveling in intimidating her. Max with her stubborn chin and long red hair and her chewed-off words, like she was always forcing herself to speak through a backlog of anger.

 _And what did she have to be angry about?_ He thought. Max had her mother’s love and his father’s frigid doting. She got regular meals and no one laid a hand on her. So yeah. A standstill situation between them.

He was so lost in thought over everything that it was muscle memory alone which had brought the Camaro to their dinky little house. Billy hardly remembered Max getting out and slamming the door because that’s what she always did. She must have. It was a part of their routine.

Then he must have backed out of the driveway and headed towards a side street off the main road, a little closer to the woods than any of the other businesses in town proper. Made it seem wilder, more tucked away. It was a place he couldn't imagine anyone at school visiting without a grandparent and he considered that a small mercy.

He parked on the packed earth in front of the restaurant and stepped out of his vehicle in a plume dust and dirt, cutting through it like an arrow.

A little bell chimed as he stepped through the door and his boots thumped on the checkered floor. He had changed into his other pair of shoes, not wanting Benny to think he’d run around a kitchen in sneakers where something much hardier and slip resistant was required.

Billy had even swept his hair back in a bun, wild as it was, just like he did back home at KC Grill every time he walked in for a shift.

A strong-looking man with a big belly and a face like a pug stepped out from the kitchen. Despite the front door being open, he told Billy, “We’re closed for another half hour. What are you doing here?”

He didn’t sound unkind. He kind of sounded like one of Billy’s uncles who didn’t beat around the bush and didn’t mean anything bad by it.

Billy inhaled and softened his expression. He needed this guy to like him enough to employ him.

He walked further into the restaurant, past the minimalist tables and chairs tucked neatly under them, holding out a hand that the man clasped without hesitation. He was truly large, in stature and girth, a person who could easily use his size to intimidate, but he merely gave Billy’s palm a firm press and pulled back, waiting.

“My name’s Billy Hargrove, sir,” he said, “And I’m here about the job listing in the paper.”

The man nodded, his mouth doing a silent _uh-huh_ , and he smiled a little, “That was fast. It came out this morning. I wasn’t expecting a bite until next week.”

“I’ve got experience in a kitchen and a reference,” Billy replied because he had no idea how to respond to someone he wasn’t heckling into fear or fury and who wasn’t responding to him with annoyance or revulsion.

He didn’t mind working in a kitchen. Billy was a physical person, his fingers twitching in moments of stillness and his body always aching to work on his car or lift weights or run across a court. Moving around a kitchen, which was hot and required a sharp mind for multi-tasking and deft hands in constant motion, was something that he was good at.

It wasn’t glamorous and he didn’t plan on sharing information about his new part-time if he got it, but he couldn’t say he was upset about the potential to work there.

The man had crossed his meaty arms over his chest, drawing attention to his simple cook’s apron knotted at the front of his waist. After thinking for a minute, he nodded.

“I’m Benny. I own this place and I cook the food. I’ll take your reference, but I’m probably not gonna call it. Fact is we’ll be working close together since it’ll just be the two of us. You slack off and I'll know. There’ll be nowhere to hide. You up to that?”

Billy slipped his hands into his front blue jean pockets so he wouldn’t mess with his bun or curl his fingers reflexively. He was trying intensely to contain himself. Billy didn’t hate the idea of working with Benny, who seemed stable and relaxed, but time would tell if that first impression held any truth. Often, it didn’t.

“I’m up for it,” he said in a firm voice

Benny grinned in response, not embarrassed and not faking it and not even breaking eye contact with him. 

“Yeah, alright, kid,” he replied, “Couple rules: keep your hair back for work, I give you two aprons but it’s five bucks if you lose one and need a replacement, and you get a free meal per shift.”

It couldn’t be this easy. Hawkins really was full of syrupy small town charm. Billy hadn’t even broken a sweat trying to convince someone he could be reliable despite the earring, the long hair, and the generally chaotic energy he carried around with him like a favorite coat. Benny hadn’t focused on anything but his face, like he was trying to puzzle out Billy’s character. This couldn’t count as an interview--it could hardly count as a conversation. They’d introduced themselves and then Billy got the job? Seriously?

But he was an opportunist at heart and he could work with the easiness of gaining employment with little to no fuss.

“When do I start?” he asked before his new boss could change his mind.

Benny just rubbed his chin thoughtfully and shrugged, “Enjoy your last week of freedom. Come in next Monday for 4 PM. You can get the hang of a slow night’s dinner crowd.”

After that, it was all strangely comfortable goodbyes and Billy was on his way home not in a blaze of triumph, but a haze of confusion and satisfaction.

He knew better than to mention his new job to anyone yet. Neil hated successes almost as much as perceived failures. He would find a way to criticize Billy somehow and what began as critique usually ended in him being shoved into the nearest piece of furniture.

Best not to mention it until Sunday night dinner to explain his absence on Monday afternoon and how he’d be training most of the week before he got a real work schedule that could be accommodated. He just needed to find a secure ride home for Maxine.

But that was later. Now was the fun part.

Excitement bubbled like champagne in his stomach at the prospect of a good workout, a hot shower, dressing up into something absolutely sinful, and finding Steve in a crowd of other people who weren’t worth his time.

.

11 PM saw Billy parking his Camaro in Theresa’s front yard, closer to the edge of her family’s property instead of nearer to the door where most people had chosen to park. Theresa’s parents had money and they had land. There was even a red barn in the huge, open backyard, lit up bright in the pitch black country night, though the sky’s constellations were visible and burning above it.

Shutting the door, Billy checked out his outline in the rolled-up car window, pleased by his own reflection. He looked like a big cat soaking up sunlight no one else could see. He wore his leather jacket unzipped with nothing underneath and knew it revealed sculpted muscles that hadn’t been there a couple years ago, when he’d been scrawny as a rat.

His temperament hadn’t changed--he’d never been afraid to throw a punch because he’d been taking them his whole life, never been afraid to throw around his charisma even when he was 140 pounds soaking wet--but his body belonged to him in this way, impressive and strong because of his constant efforts.

He walked up the yard to the front door where the porch lights shone like little suns, ZZ Top’s “Legs” blaring from the indoor speakers like they knew he was coming. It wasn’t hard enough for his tastes, but it sure beat fucking Billy Joel.  

“Billy the keg king’s here,” Tommy said, opening the door just before Billy let himself in and then yelled, “Ayyy, he’s here,” to the room at large.

Girls straightened their posture as they checked him out and guys flicked him the coolest “hey, man’s” they could muster. He responded to no one and surveyed the house instead. The living room had high ceilings and glass vases and Billy had no doubt he’d shatter at least one tonight just because it was there.

“Alright, Tommy,” Billy said, chewing on a toothpick he’d swiped from a table at Benny’s, “No need to cause a scene.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” replied Tommy, sharper than usual, “You love a scene. What about this afternoon with Harrington?”

That made him glance at Tommy for the first time since he’d arrived.

“Yeah, what about it? You jealous, Hader?” he asked meanly. Whatever influence Tommy thought his opinion had over him was wrong and Billy felt that familiar itch to show him exactly what he thought of his arrogance. Or, really, his stupidity. Billy held loyalty for no one, especially not some limp dick talking out his mouth at a high school party.

Tommy probably thought he looked good tonight, an expensive bought-that-way ratty t-shirt tucked into blue jeans and a fuzzy black headband wrapped around his forehead. He mostly resembled a little kid, trying too hard to look like something he was incapable of being. Not sharp enough. Not tough enough. Too afraid to truly get in someone’s face.

“What gives you the right to say you know me, Thomas?” Billy moved in slow but unstoppable, “I don’t recall ever telling you my favorite color. Fuck. Off.”

And there it was, the way anyone who wasn’t Steve Harrington just dissolved at a hard look from him. Tommy swallowed, petulant but unwilling to oppose Billy’s threatening bulk and his easy shift into violence like he was simply changing his shirt. 

Tommy thought they were friends. He thought he had Billy's ear, a seat at his table, the ability to push him in a particular direction--and Billy could put up with assholes, but he had no tolerance for someone implying he'd done something he shouldn't have.

Before Tommy could respond, someone grabbed him by the back of his shirt and pulled him into the crowd, whooping his name drunkenly. He let it happen, giving Billy one more angry, impotent stare before he melted back into the fray.

“Hey, Billy,” someone greeted him and he turned to Frannie Day, a cute Filipino girl with a pretty floral dress on that stood out from the mass of high rise jeans and crop tops. They’d spoken before between classes, mostly because Fran wasn’t afraid to flirt and she clearly got off on confrontation if the red spots on her cheeks were any indication. It wasn’t a huge surprise that people would watch Billy’s fuse go off and then approach him. He couldn’t remember a hook up that had started any other way, mostly before, during, or after parties. That was his time to play.

“Frannie,” he greeted, much warmer than he’d been to Tommy but still bored. He knew this game. He was after something infinitely more interesting.

Before she could continue, he shot her a heavy-lidded smile and walked away. It was too loud to see if she gasped or scowled at his rudeness, but it wasn’t really in his wheelhouse to give a fuck over someone’s reaction to his moods.

He searched the house high and low, walked in on fucking couples in closets and bathrooms, raided the barn and acquired a huge glass of godawful jungle juice, and edged his way along the property line where trimmed grass turned into haunting, gnarled trees so tall it hurt to crane his neck back to see the tops of them.

It had all taken about an hour as he leisurely melded in and out of cliques and dance pits, the swirling heat of all that tension and horniness and want, but he hadn’t spotted Harrington. _Maybe_ , he’d said. _Maybe I will_ , he’d repeated, the exhaustion in his eyes sharing space with a darkness Billy didn’t understand. 

He just knew he wanted to.

He found himself playing back what memories he could of the last weekend as he polished off the jungle juice and set the glass in the grass. _I told you to plant your feet_ , he remembered telling Steve, who’d hit the ground and simply rose back up to follow him into the house. Steve had been full of resolve and quiet and calm, nothing like the crazy, carefree guy Billy had been told about whenever the topic of Harrington came up at school or a party.

Billy really  _had_ meant it, when he’d asked Steve if he knew how people talked about him. It was absolutely fucking jarring to see someone who’d supposedly told Jonathan Byers that he and his poor-ass family were trash, who didn’t seem to give a single fuck that a girl had disappeared in his backyard if the gossip was to be believed, who painted graffiti calling Wheeler a whore when he thought she'd cheated, and who’d fucked three girls on the same night and sat at their lunch table the next day laughing with all of them without any of them the wiser.

That guy? That guy wasn’t the person Billy had known since August. The person he’d met didn't skulk around with his tail tucked between his legs so much as a total lack of interest in the scene around him. In the people around him. Sure, he’d attended parties with that speck of nothing named Nancy and he’d gotten his ass handed to him time and again at practice--but he wasn’t truly _there_ . Billy knew what that was like. It meant no one at home was checking. From what Billy heard, it sounded like there was nobody home _period_ at the Harrington residence.

Fran had proven an invaluable source of information about Steve, even with her steadfast mission to flirt him under the bleachers for a go. He appreciated her well of knowledge enough to stay friendly with her. Tonight’s party notwithstanding--but he couldn’t be on his very best behavior all the time.

It appeared Harrington was going to bail. Billy couldn’t say he was surprised. Steve had a face like roadkill right now and that wasn’t conducive to being in the mood for wild, crazy fun around drunk people who weren’t discreet about pointing and laughing.

He was thinking, gazing out into the pitch black treeline, when a rustle of leaves and the cracking of sticks alerted him to the fact that someone might be out there. Billy leaned forward slightly, listening.

And there it was again: the snapping of branches underfoot, the crushing sound which accompanied dead leaves rubbing together. He heard it and it turned him to stone, alert and wary. There were no sounds of merrymaking, nothing like the cacophony a drunk asshole with half a brain would produce out in the sticks. 

Then a flash of something--grey? Green? An animal, maybe. He felt a rising crescendo of adrenaline in the otherwise silent night because the birds had gone completely silent and he could no longer detect the sound of crickets rubbing their feet together. He thought something was going to pounce and he felt the slightest tremor go through his shoulders.

Before he could do anything, he realized some party goers had made their way from the deck out to where he stood. His attention shifted to them when he saw who their leader was.

“ _Ooh_ , big bad Hargrove, ready to take on the great unknown,” cackled Tommy, slapping his back as a group of dumb fucks laughed behind him. The only reason Billy didn't deck him was because he was too focused on the distinct sense of a presence that had all but disappeared when Tommy started talking. It did amuse him a little, though. Two days ago, Tommy had been in line to suck his dick. Now he was making petty wisecracks at his expense when it was apparent Billy didn’t answer to anyone. It was going to piss him off later, but for now he felt detached.

“Just taking a walk, it’s good for your nerves,” Billy said, raising his eyebrows and taking in the puppies around him. They seemed so--shiny, young, taken care of. Driving whatever immaculate car mommy and daddy decided to gift them with, probably spoon feeding them dinner every night. Caviar, foie gras, lobster--all on delicate china, he imagined.

Billy scoffed, “But I wouldn’t worry about that, Tommy, since you don’t have any.”

He felt like a smooth operator around such non-threatening people. They didn’t live in the same reality as Billy, too busy sleeping on satin sheets and having parents that loved them, and their words tended to bounce right off him.

Tommy was clearly pretty far past the point of inebriation and holding onto a girl who was definitely _not_ Carol like a lifeline. She giggled, swaying a little herself, her long auburn hair brushing her thin arms.

“Fuck you, you can't even walk into the woods,” Tommy slurred, not making any sense, “But _I_ can go into the woods. Grew up in these woods. I’m a wild man.”

“So that’s what they’re calling hicks these days,” Billy replied, cocking his head to the side.

“I’m going,” declared Tommy, belligerent with Wild Turkey if Billy was smelling him right, “And I’m takin’ you with me,” he whispered loudly to the girl attached to him.

Then he was pulling not-Carol into the tall grass and disappearing through the pines, legs pushing through thick underbrush until the forest opened up and it became bare dirt ground. They slid out of sight as quick as clumsy shadows, surprisingly quiet for trashed teenagers.

He didn't warn them. There was nothing to warn them about besides some breaking branches. That wasn't anything, just normal woods noises. He wasn't going to stand around and let a group of kids from Indy take turns laughing at him. He wasn't scared of fucking anything anyway. Let Tommy get sucked off against a tree. Different strokes for different folks.

Billy’s mouth turned into an empty smile and he said to the remaining guys, “Looks like we just witnessed the end of Tommy’s relationship. Wanna get a celebratory beer?”

And that was all it took to get them to clear out, rushing back to the house ready to be rowdy and too loud about Tommy’s hookup in the living room surrounded by a captive audience of wide-eyed juniors and seniors.

He stayed for a bit, thought about the night he wanted to have versus what it was shaping up to be. He didn't exactly know what he was hoping for, but he knew he'd wanted to see Harrington. Call it guilt; call it excitement. He looked up at the stars and quickly found Arcturus and Sirius and Rigel, just like his mother had shown him so many years ago, and stood staring up at them until his neck began to hurt.

He sighed and turned to make his way back to the house, but didn’t get the chance to take more than a few steps because he suddenly heard a shriek and a second later not-Carol, leaves caught in her hair and dirt all over her jeans, came stumbling out of the woods crying.

“Get _away_ ,” she shrieked as she ran towards him. Screaming at whatever was behind her, which turned out to be Tommy, seemingly sober after ten minutes of necking on top of a bush or whatever got his rocks off. He swiped a thumb from the corner of his mouth along his entire lower lip. It looked wet. Like it was gleaming black with oil. He walked steadily forward, as though his utter drunkenness had been a complete joke, and Billy saw that he'd been mistaken.

The boy emerging from the woods was wiping blood off his lip.

“Dawn,” Tommy huffed a laugh, eyes dark as a spider’s, “C’mon, Dawn, I thought you _liked_ it rough.”

His stance was all wrong. Tommy generally hunched and postured and made stupid jokes that reflected his tiny brain. He didn’t stand tall or straight or pull his shoulders back, his gaze scanning the area like a hunter checking for stray movement. Billy could clock a fighter from a mile away, since he was nine and dropped a plate full of spaghetti on the living room floor and his dad rose up from the couch and slapped him so hard his head hit the corner of the coffee table. He knew what a slugger stood like, talked like, how they turned the air around them tense and stormy and he was reeling from Tommy’s sudden shift from harmless fly to something much more predatory.

Not-Carol bolted straight into his chest and as much as he hated being touched when he wasn’t fucking someone, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders to brace her and then pushed her behind him. Not gently, but not rough either.

He couldn’t help but notice her swelling bottom lip dripping blood.

“Did you punch a chick, Hader?” Billy asked, no hint of mockery in him, trying to keep up with the weird shift in the atmosphere. One minute he was at a stranger's house drinking their booze and the next he stood at the lip of a forest, facing something totally alien that wore the face of a boy he knew.

Tommy merely smiled, mouth like a scythe, contorted and frightening. He looked wrong. Everything about him was wrong.

“Didn’t think you cared,” is all he replied. The headband was gone and the humidity outside flattened his brown hair to his scalp. He looked older. Meaner.

A hand grabbed his jacket, small and clenching, and the bleeding girl trembled and said, “He bit me. He bit me.”

Billy watched as Tommy cackled again, spreading his arms out in a wide shrug, “You told me to give it to you. I was. I just didn’t know you’d be such a bitch about it.”

He could see the charged electricity of violence in Tommy, fuck, even not-Carol gripped his jacket harder and he thought he could hear her teeth chatter. He didn’t take his eyes off Tommy. He knew better than to look away from someone in his state of mind.

“Get out of here now,” Billy ordered the girl behind him and then snarled, “ _Now_ ,” when she refused to move. She took off the second he raised his voice and he could hear the way her steps were uneven and too heavy. He knew a whole lot of people were about to be rushing outside after they saw the lines of blood dripping down her chin and onto her shirt like a bib.

As soon as they were alone, Billy forced his muscles to relax. Play possum, play ignorant.

“Sounds like you did a real bad thing tonight,” he said casually.

Tommy nodded like he agreed, “Hm. It was going to be you. It was supposed to be you. But you aren’t the one who got close enough so this’ll do," and he looked down at his own body, his own hands, as he said it.

And the next thing Billy knew, he’d been pushed hard enough to bite his tongue and he was hitting the ground, landing on his tailbone. He hissed, wincing, putting his palms down on the grass to brace himself. It was like he hadn’t even seen Tommy coming. Which couldn’t be possible.

Billy was always tense. Always waiting for the tide to turn against him. Always watching for the next hit. He should’ve seen it.

What Tommy had done, whatever speed and force he'd used, it was like he'd done it in the literal blink of an eye. It was like he wasn't even human.

 


	3. o wrong, wrong--it was my nature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim Hopper keeps finding damaged children everywhere he looks and it makes him want to punch walls, Billy misses curfew and he might be having a panic attack, Steve can't sleep and just wants some candy, and, oh yeah, why the fuck doesn't Tommy have lips anymore?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's be clear about this: Billy is absolutely a kid compared to a real-ass adult army vet/police officer and that's exactly what Hopper thinks of him as. Also, for the sake of me using this reference, in this universe the movie Clue was released in '84, not '85.

Billy wasn’t sure how he got to the police station or what time it was. The chair he sat in was hard and uncomfortable. His tailbone ached. He stared blankly at the desk he faced, covered in all sorts of papers and office detritus. 

He was strangely concerned with his hair, which was full of blond curls and glinting with white-gold strands, and it felt like it was _everywhere_ and he felt out of control and like he couldn’t get a good look at the room around him.

He dug in his pocket until he found his ponytail holder from the job interview earlier and quickly gathered the mess into a bun. Then he forced himself to slouch a bit harder when the door to the chief’s office opened and closed behind him as Jim Hopper made his way past Billy around to his desk, tan uniform doing nothing to make him look less intimidating.

Billy did what he always did when faced with the stern face of an adult male: he waited to see what they would do. He could howl at and fight anyone but his father--and men who looked like him, had the same set jaw and eyes like scalpels and the blocky foreheads where veins popped out right before they attacked. 

Jim took him in, cataloged his bare chest and open leather jacket, his Virgin Mary necklace and the burning, watchful eyes. When he’d arrived at the scene, all he saw was the chaos of a teenaged party coupled with a hysterical, bleeding girl and a boy who wouldn’t talk. 

At this point, he had plenty of experience with bleeding kids. With kids who just watched him, mouths closed.

Dawn Schaeffer had needed medical care immediately, the deep cut on her bottom lip gushing pretty much nonstop. She’d looked so scared, green eyes wide as dinner plates as though they were locked on an advancing wolf, knowing already what its claws felt like. He’d left her in the care of her half-furious, half-panicking parents with the promise to stop by the next morning to take her statement. They’d nodded and ushered her into their car to take her to the hospital. 

Then he’d been left with the boy.

Everyone at the party--well, whoever his deputies had managed to stop so only about ten hormonal idiots--had been whispering that Billy Hargrove had been out there when Dawn had come in sobbing, that Billy Hargrove had a mean temper and a quick trigger, that he’d _laughed in delight_ when Nancy Wheeler slapped him before homeroom on Monday, that she hadn’t said a word but everyone knew it was because he’d fucked up someone’s face pretty bad last weekend. 

She’d slapped him and he’d laughed--and Hopper didn't pay much mind to wagging tongues, but that concerned him. 

Boys like that were trouble. They couldn’t be taught, couldn’t be tamed, and nine times out of ten they were facing something at home that would scare the tar out of their big-mouthed peers. This, uh, _Billy Hargrove_ was staring at him like he expected--something. Like he had Jim pegged. Knew exactly what kind of guy he was. Like he’d faced down someone like Jim and lost so many times he just knew to sit there, quietly, waiting for the world around him to burn down.

He'd seen a million Billy Hargroves, but dealing with kids never got easier.

He sighed a big sigh, wishing he could be home sitting on his couch out of his awful work slacks already. Instead, he was cracking down on teen drinking he didn’t really give a shit about because someone’s fucking daughter had her lip bitten through and no one knew who’d done it, excited drunken whispers aside.

“So,” he started, leaning forward and rubbing his forehead like he was soothing a migraine, “let’s not dawdle. Basically, everyone goes to a party, Dawn Schaeffer gets her lip split open, you’re found sitting right where she came from outside. See, we’re sharing. Now it’s your turn.”

Jim ended his recap and stared at Billy across the table, checking for a reaction. From what he could tell, the kid was just mulling it all over. He seemed spooked, underneath all that stoic defiance and his forced-lazy body language. 

The boy recovered quickly, a small shake of his head and then he was making eye contact and giving him a considering expression.

“She and Hader went into the woods,” Billy said, slow and serious, and Jim watched as his fingers clenched and unclenched rhythmically, “Then they came out.”

Jim began to settle into the interview. The punk in his office was being truthful. Nervous, too, but he could see it so clear: he was trying to get this over with so he could leave and seemed to know the quickest way out the door was not to fuck around. Even after this chat, his night wasn’t remotely close to over. He still had to be driven back to his car and then make his way home.

Jim had driven him to the station, concerned about his sobriety, but he could see Billy was sober and cognizant. Any alcohol had worked its way out of his system hours ago. It was nearly 2 AM now, time always passing quickly when they got this sort of call.

He asked, “Who’s Hader? I’m gonna need some clarification, kid.”

Billy exhaled heavily and broke eye contact. He fidgeted, stared at his lap and then Jim’s desk and sent a fleeting glance back to his face. 

Jim’s hackles raised, instincts buzzing. A different tactic, then, and one that made Jim feel more comfortable with this obviously freaked out kid sitting across from him.

“Tonight was different, not what you were expecting. I get that. You’re not in trouble. You’re a witness giving a statement. Tell me who Hader is and what they were doing out there.”

At that, Billy shot him a small smirk that Jim figured broke the hearts of plenty high school girls and said flatly, “What d’you think they were doing,” and it wasn’t a question.

But Jim just raised his eyebrows, unimpressed, and said, “Continue.”

“Tommy Hader’s in my grade at school. He wanted to get his dick wet. I was at the edge of Theresa’s property for some quiet. They ran past me into the woods to hookup. Before I walked inside, the chick ran outta the trees like she was on fire. Plowed straight into me and she was bleeding from her mouth.”

Jim saw him pause, like he wasn’t sure how to go on. Instead of prompting him, he waited.

“Then Tommy came out. He seemed off. He’s a little bitch usually and he was drunk off his ass, but ten minutes in the woods and he came out--like that.”

“Like what,” Jim found himself asking without even thinking about it. Interviews were calculated things, but he just wanted to know. About another kid in the woods, going in regular and coming out different. Forget Billy’s apprehension; Jim felt a ghastly trepidation over the similarities. 

“He was--fine. I mean, he wasn’t fucked up anymore. And he didn’t look sorry or scared about her. He seemed--”

And Billy broke off, looking like he kept adding numbers together over and over again and getting the wrong sum every time. The fluorescent lights flickered in the office, regular shitty office building lighting that Jim hated, and he couldn’t help but notice the boy had deep lines under his eyes. That despite the skin he was showing off, he looked strangely fragile. It made Jim want to hand him a t-shirt and a blanket, impulses he blamed squarely on Eleven. Something about exhausted, damaged kids, something about how little he could truly do for them--it grated on him.

Billy Hargrove was here to give a statement and Jim, who could scent chronic pain and anxiety from a mile away, was overcome by the tired slant of his cheekbones. His skittish hands that couldn’t stay still. The pursed mouth that didn’t want to say a word but knew it had to.

“Seemed how?” Jim said, more softly than he intended.

“Empty,” Billy told him. He bit the word out, as if he was afraid he’d given the wrong answer or shown too much of himself, chafing on any perceived sense of exposure to someone bigger and stronger than himself.

Jim’s heart clenched and he felt a quiet throb at his temples where a headache was forming. This town. This fucking town. Supernatural or not, something about Hawkins chewed kids up and spit them out. 

Then he realized the boy had spoken and he’d totally missed it.

“What?” he asked.

“I said,” Billy said, more awake than he’d been since Jim got to the Vestal residence, “You think it was me. You think _I_ did that. You don’t have to pretend.”

Jim took a good, long look at him--his teeth digging into his upper lip and something in his expression reminding Jim of a junkyard dog, feral and afraid.

The kid was trying to pull off a band-aid, to control which way the conversation was going or thought it was going. That was instinct, he guessed, because all Jim saw when he looked at the petulant chin rising was a kid bracing for a hit he thought was coming.

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Billy. All the kids hanging out with Tommy right before the incident corroborated your story. They’ll have to be questioned again, but by all accounts Tommy and Dawn went into the woods. Dawn already said it was Tommy. This isn’t _Clue_ ,” Jim said dryly, “You’re not being framed.”

Billy didn’t relax, but he didn’t argue back. 

“Will you have to question me again?” he asked.

“Yes,” Jim said plainly.

Billy swallowed, throat dry and clicking, and replied, “Can we set up a time?”

 _Rather not have me at his house_ , Jim thought and the cop in him just kept checking off boxes concerning Hargrove’s home situation. Skittish. Angry. Control freak. A whole picture was forming in front of his face, but it wasn’t the issue at hand, and it seared like a brand to even think that.

“Sure,” he said.

After confirmation that Jim wasn’t going to slap cuffs on him or some other melodramatic teenage bullshit, Billy appeared to lose the slightest bit of tension. Instead of the lethargic lean to his body, he let himself sit up straight. Show that he was really here, paying attention. 

“Okay,” he said, “okay. Thank you. Sir.”

Jim almost groaned.

“Don’t thank me, kid,” he rasped out, prematurely exhausted, "And don't ever call me sir."

Jim wasn’t going to be sleeping anytime soon, already thinking about calling Tommy Hader’s parents to see if he’d returned home, driving by Dawn Schaeffer’s house in the morning asking questions she’d have to answer through terrible fear and facial swelling. He’d need to see to it that Billy got home after he slid into the driver’s seat of that beat up Camaro.

He’d need to see Eleven, check-in and maybe sit down for some waffles with her. That thought calmed him. No matter how crazy things got, he would make time for his girl. 

And then, once more, as if it was his life’s new mission: another frantic search for a missing boy who’d last been seen near the woods. Jim wanted to sleep so badly, but the only thing he was getting was about a gallon of coffee to fuel him onward.

Hawkins was teaching him a lesson, Jim thought, about how he was just one tiny speck of a man trying to fix things that had been broken long before he ever laid eyes on them.

.

Billy was feeling light headed from relief. It looked like John Hopman or whatever the fuck his name was had no intention of pinning anything on him. Neil Hargrove was a harsh disciplinarian; he couldn’t imagine his reaction to Billy being accused of assaulting someone by a cop. He was a real “do as I say, not as I do” kind of asshole.

He also slept so light it was impossible to sneak into the house without waking him up. He’d intended to either come home or pass out at Theresa’s house. Neil’s rule was that Billy needed to come home before midnight or find himself somewhere to stay because no one was barging in and out of his house at all hours of the night like white trash. 

He couldn’t believe how completely drained he felt after the chief dropped him off at his car with a promise to head straight home. Well, what the cop didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him and was none of his fucking business anyway. 

Billy had slept in his car a million times. It was the only option available to him tonight. He just had to find somewhere to park. But first, he planned to stop by the 24-hour gas station for some pretzels and a bottle of water with whatever quarters he could dig up from between his seats. 

He felt weak, like he’d run for miles. His vision was growing spotty. There’d been so many chances, so many close calls for Neil to become involved in this terrible night and the near-misses were piling up on Billy, making his chest hurt when he breathed from the run-off panic.

When he pulled into the gas station parking lot, a grungy place that Billy still didn’t know the name of because the sign was faded to a bleached white color, he breathed a sigh of relief. He figured no one ever repaired it because all the locals knew what it was called. Everything else shut down after nine, ‘cept for this shady shithole. 

He wasn’t surprised to see it open at 3:30 AM. What he _was_ surprised to see was Steve Harrington’s car. He parked right in front of the door and peered through it, which was easy because it was one big window, and he felt his stomach drop to his knees and his whole chest unclenched like a fist when he spotted Steve wandering the aisles, Coke in hand.

There wasn’t anyone in Hawkins besides Harrington who he was excited to see. School was a long drag down a dark rabbit hole of boredom and irritation, where everyone he looked at had no personality, no resistance to them; it was like they were all tan robots, tasteless as oatmeal. No spirit, just dead eyes and awful clothes and flat, nasally voices trying to get his attention.

He resented it. Where they blended in easily, Steve stood out. He was nothing like Billy thought he’d be and also somehow evaded any alternatives he could come up with. He couldn't be predicted.

Through the fog of fatigue, Billy felt a spark of warmth, a candle in the sunless room his head space had become since Tommy came out of the woods, a film of red over his white teeth and looking at Billy like a slobbering wild dog, his features illuminated with a bottomless hunger.

As if summoned, Steve’s head rose from the rows of junk food he was surveying and he caught Billy’s eye. Steve wore festive plaid pajama pants and a navy hoodie and he stared at Billy with less surprise than he expected from him. 

He was a vision of what Billy thought home might look like, a sleepy boy covered in soft layers and pale skin and pink lips. Half-lidded eyes and big hands. A picture he didn’t dare dream of beneath his roof where it felt like anyone could intercept it. Billy leaned back in his seat and continued watching Harrington through the door's window. He wasn’t quite sure what safety meant or how comfort was supposed to feel, but the buzzing in his head and the bursting-out feeling in his fingers slowly faded and he thought what he was feeling might be safety-adjacent and comfort-adjacent at the very least. He hummed some Metallica song to himself languidly as Steve brought his purchases up to the cashier and paid for them with a crisp ten dollar bill. 

He was taller than Billy by an inch and it showed. He looked long and lean and his baggy night clothes did nothing to hide it. Billy felt his face go slack, free of expression, and he noticed the way his heart had stopped jolting every few breaths.

Billy mused, _Coke and sour gummies at 4 in the morning? What was Harrington thinking putting that junk in his body?_ \--but it was an easy thought. Amused. A little dreamy.

Fuck, he was tired. And some part of him realized he might be shaking, just a bit.

He went very still when Steve stepped out of the station and, like a goddamn Christmas miracle, started towards the Camaro. He stopped at Billy’s side and leaned slightly down to look at Billy through the space where he'd rolled his window half-way down as he was driving, desperate for the night air to keep him awake and aware. 

“Alright, Hargrove?” Steve asked, his voice a calm murmur Billy had grown accustomed to. It was the voice he craved in the aftermath of a clash with Neil nowadays, the words running together like warm water sliding down his back. 

He couldn’t fathom why Steve didn’t completely ignore him like the piece of shit he knew he was. It’s not like he’d let himself be ignored, though, and it would only have resulted in his yelling across an empty parking lot anyway. They'd be speaking regardless, if Billy had anything to do with it and he couldn't leave well enough alone if he tried. He just didn’t know why--couldn’t fathom the thought process--that led this very pretty boy with Billy's marks on his very pretty face to instigating a conversation.

Billy grinned faintly, hanging onto bravado by a thread, “Fuckin’ fantastic. Got the munchies, Harrington? I didn't know royalty smoked green.”

Watching Harrington roll his eyes was a treat. Billy grasped so much of what drew him to Steve, but there was also something he couldn’t parse that coalesced with his list of reasons, something like magnetism. Like fucking magic. Like the beauty marks right above Steve’s sharp jawline, the moles dotting his neck, were placed there specifically so Billy could trace over them with his eyes, try to connect them in small, intimate constellations. He was so--different, from what Billy had been expecting from a town like Hawkins. Steve should’ve been the popular jock asshole player he was supposed to be and they should have been actual rivals or party acquaintances, but instead Steve’s voice was careful and firm and his eyes never left Billy’s when they spoke. 

“You don’t know the details of my personal life--shocker,” Steve replied, the sarcasm blunted by his easy tone. Still there, still sharp. Just nothing Billy had to worry about running him through. It didn’t mean he held back, though, far from it.

“Mommy and daddy don’t mind you getting the good shit then?” he asked snidely. He suddenly realized his hair was still in a bun and he felt his neck burn knowing that Steve now knew what he looked like when he wasn’t performing. Concealer and eyeliner all smudged away, hairy frizzy and swept up, sitting in his car at ass o’clock in the morning without even the armor of a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth like a kiss.

Steve’s mouth did twist then. 

“I don’t have to worry too much about their opinion,” he replied smoothly, “ _Mommy_ and _daddy_ keep a busy schedule.”

That’s when Billy spotted it: the glass wall Harrington could put up between himself and someone else. He was taunting someone who was refusing to let it touch him. If it did, though, well, that might be another story. 

“Got a sob story, huh--” began Billy, warming to the topic.

Steve cut him off instantly, “Poor little rich boy? Go cry your rich tears? You think I haven’t heard this before, Hargrove? Ha-fucking-ha. _Say it._ Say it all.”

“A prickly pretty boy tonight,” observed Billy, who was really starting to feel dizzy. He needed water. Probably. Something in his stomach other than the sour remnants of cheap vodka and pineapple juice and PBR. But he could hold on--he had to hold on a bit, squeeze as much of Steve’s attention from him as he could, and then find a place to park and crash.

“I’m just tired,” Steve sighed, as all the air and anger and tension went out of his shoulders, “If you’re going to insult me, at least cover some new ground and keep it interesting.”

Billy laughed, more breath than sound, and then wound the window down all the way so he could rest his arms on the window frame and lean in his chin on them. The chilly winter air felt good on his overheated face. He looked up at Steve from between his lashes and smiled.

Steve’s expression was taken aback. He seemed helpless to the flush creeping up his neck, the way he took a step closer as if Billy was reeling him in inch by inch. 

“Too bad I’m all out of imagination,” Billy said, flirty and _not thinking about it_ and if he closed his eyes now he’d fall asleep in his Camaro with Steve’s gaze on him, “Wanna take a ride?”

“Are you going to smash a plate against my face if I do?” was his response. Billy smiled again, helplessly, and somewhere deep in his chest he winced, too. He guessed if he got to taunt Steve about his big, fancy, lonely house, he got to bring up Billy’s very obvious anger issues. That time he broke the face of someone he just wanted to keep looking at him.

His reply died on his tongue as his vision focused on what was behind Steve because something...was there. No warning at all. It occurred to him, a pale shivering thought in the back of his mind, that he could hear the chattering of vermin. Then that something moved and became more than something. 

It became someone.

Immediately, he was wide awake and reaching out a hand to fist in Harrington’s sweatshirt to pull him forward. Like that would do anything to shield him from the person behind him.

Harrington flinched back, crying out, “What the _fuck_ , man--” when a new voice cut through his protestations.

Tommy sneered, “Gonna offer me a ride, too, Hargrove?”

“Tommy?” Steve asked incredulously, “What are you doing out right now? Mrs. Hader is going to slaughter you. Hargrove, _back off_.”

He tried to pull away, but even waterlogged with fatigue and fog and a numb hysteria, Billy was stronger. And he had more reason to be forceful because he understood better than Steve what was happening. 

Billy reached back and popped up the car door lock to the backseat with nimble, practiced fingers. There. Unlocked.

“Get in, Harrington,” he tried to whisper urgently, though it came out like a hiss. He wasn’t good at gentle. 

“No, no--what?” Steve’s voice had gone higher in his confusion. 

Tommy laughed behind them. He hadn’t taken a step forward, but there were shadows crowding around his eyes, spreading out like raven wings. Billy must have been seeing things because the veins running up his neck seemed to turn black like the silhouette of spindly tree branches. He hadn’t moved closer; he didn’t need to.

Billy didn’t have the time or the patience to convince Steve of anything, but he had to. He had to make him believe. Had to make him trust this one request.

“Talk later,” he said quickly, “Steve, get in. Get in now. Fucking, _I don’t know_ \--come with me if you want to live.”

Something clicked when Billy said the nerdiest shit he’d ever said to another human being. He wanted to laugh, but he was afraid of what might come out if he did. He realized he was shaking harder. They had to keep moving and he’d quoted a line from fucking _Terminator_  like Steve was Linda Hamilton whose character got pregnant by the guy who said that  _oh my god_ and--

“Harrington, get in my car now. That's _not_ Tommy--”

It felt like the truth when he said it, though he knew he sounded totally insane, and Harrington’s eyes widened and his mouth became the sort of “O” Billy would want to commission a fucking oil painting of normally, but nothing mattered except the way Steve was already shoving his body into the backseat and crawling over the dividing armrest to the passenger seat up front. 

Billy felt the cold air burning red spots on his cheeks and he could hear Steve mumbling curses next to him. The sound of chittering, a chorus of short but constant squeals, got louder. When Billy looked over at Tommy, he thought he was going to throw up because rats with decayed skin and eyes like pond scum were crawling out from beneath the hemline of his t-shit, bursting up from the rim of his collar, and slithering down his arms like bird shit. It was disgusting and he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

“Hargrove-- _hey, Billy_ \--come on, we have to go,” came Steve’s grounding voice. Billy became aware of the sound of his own too-fast breathing and Harrington’s hardly-there press of fingers to the back of his hand gripping the wheel. 

Billy gritted his teeth and barked, “I know, I know,” and slammed his car in reverse. They peeled out of the lot as small rotten bodies swarmed the tarmac. As Tommy stood in the middle of his pestilent circus, his arms rising high like he was conducting an orchestra of filth.

Then he looked straight at Billy and smiled with a mouth that no longer had lips, like they’d been cut off with blunt scissors, and now showed only rows upon rows of pointed teeth. 

And yeah, sure, they were speeding away in his car, but something told Billy that wasn't really going to make a difference.

 


	4. but i was always that person

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve can't stop remembering Tommy in that parking lot and being in a car with Billy is kind of like wrestling an alligator but he doesn't totally hate it, Billy is tired of dry heaving and he's pissed by how not-hot he looks currently, and the night is so terribly, terribly long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song in this chapter is Lead Belly's "In the Pines" because I am helpless against blues songs and we stan a musical legend in this fic.

Steve Harrington was having the kind of night that rustled the curtains he’d drawn around the contents of his now-weekly nightmares. But he couldn’t get the image out of his head: Tommy, a boy he could remember losing every one of his teeth in elementary school and who was more excited than anyone else about the Tooth Fairy visiting, was no longer someone he recognized. In his place stood, like, the fucking Antichrist pulling Upside Down-roided rats out of his clothes like bunnies from a magician’s hat.

Steve had learned a lot in the past year, finding out he wasn’t one to start a fight and he had no idea how to handle a relationship he genuinely wanted to be in and that Nancy Wheeler was quiet and demure and willing to shoot someone if it meant saving them from the Upside Down. 

He’d seen stalwart, actual strength shining out from Jonathan Byers’ introverted face like a beacon and then there was Dustin’s bravery and Max’s resilience and Lucas’ stubborn loyalty and--just, it hit him so hard, how much he admired the people around him.

That even if they weren’t looking at him for warmth or affection or real friendship, _he_ was looking at _them_ and it was making him better. And he’d never felt that way before. Not with his family and not with Tommy and Carol, not when climbing into girls’ rooms whose names he tended to mix up. But now he wanted to be better. 

He wanted to help.

Lately, he’d gotten lucky. His world opened up and for a brief, shining moment the people around him handed him a bat and let him make a difference. Kind of. No one had looked to him for guidance before or made him feel like he was capable. He felt as if he owed those dipshit kids a lot.

But then, of course, there was Billy Hargrove. He was like some hot churning mass of energy that took over a room and it seemed like every time he entered one he zeroed in on Steve immediately. 

And Steve _had_ been to California to visit relatives last summer, not completely the Midwestern ignorant hick Billy thought everyone here was, but when he’d been there no one had skin quite as golden, eyelashes quite so long and inky black, and certainly no one who could go from threateningly playful to berserker rage like flipping a switch the way Billy did.

California, in retrospect, merely confirmed that Billy wasn’t a product of his location. He could have shown up like one of those surfer boys and smiled a sweet _God-Only-Knows_ Beach Boys smile and done much better with the high school populace at large. He chose instead to rule by charisma and fear like a mob boss whose dick everyone wanted to jump on.

He was aggressive and he was pushy and he’d take a mile even if you didn’t give an inch and he _never stopped looking at Steve_ even after he’d fucked up his face. Steve thought for sure Billy would be done crowding him on the court, at house parties, in the locker rooms and the school shower, making too-intense eye contact and letting a big, mean smile spread wide across his face, because he’d finally figured out how weak Steve was. 

That he’d go away, having gotten what he wanted, and find someone else--someone who was actually _interesting_ \--to fixate over. It was messed up and Steve realized that, but Billy Hargrove was the only person who didn’t think he was peripheral. A passive part of the background.

And it wasn’t like it was a big deal, his place on the sidelines of everyone's lives. His feelings about his role in Hawkins wasn't imminently reasonable the way his (and he knew they weren’t really his, but they _felt_ like his responsibility) little nerd herd was with their STEM minds and what the fuck ever--it wasn’t like he wasn’t aware that growing up with an unfaithful, absent father and a jealous mother more focused on playing mind games with her spouse than raising a teenager gave him more baggage than he was willing to admit to. 

Steve knew himself--knew that between himself and Nancy in their relationship, he’d been the more emotional partner, more given to jealousy and anger and joy and tenderness. He was a lover, not a fighter, much better at using his heart than his head. He wasn’t solutions-based the way the kids or Nancy or Jonathan or Hopper were, knew that unlike them he’d accidentally stumbled into this life-defining terror of the Upside Down. Not because he was needed, but because he was there. A warm body. Cannon fodder. Not much else.

He felt it, deeply, how he was just a secondary character playing a bit role in the momentous life journeys of more powerful, more exciting, and more important people. That every night they went to sleep feeling the urgency of their actions while Steve slept in a guest bedroom he’d decided was his new room when he was 13 and tired of hoping his mom would enter his childhood bedroom before bedtime, book of the month in hand.

He wasn’t great at reading, tripped over words and sometimes it felt like the letters were all scrambled up, but he liked to listen to her. It felt like the only time she really focused on him, not looking at him directly but pressing a story he wouldn’t be able to get through on his own to his ears, voice softer than cashmere and lilting with other people’s feelings in other people’s lives. She seemed more comfortable, then, softer--her mouth full of fictional feelings that had nothing to do with her own.

And then she would leave the room to go pack her bags and pack Steve’s dad’s bags and they’d be gone. The amount of time they were away only increased as Steve got older.

Their frequent absences weren't a secret in a small town like Hawkins, not to most of his friends’ parents who paid attention and caught on quick and eventually his friends had noticed and nothing stayed quiet for long in the school’s hallways. People made comments, but teenagers were straight up assholes most of the time.

Billy’s jabs hardly registered when he’d made them in the parking lot. Most of what he said was throw-away, antagonizing bullshit anyway and he’d grown up playing sports so he was no stranger to almost any degree of heckling. 

Besides, Steve was too busy thinking about the chilly air and Hargrove’s chin perched perfectly on his folded arms. Steve got the impression he wasn’t trying to be brutal or harsh with him. He seemed paler, tired. Subdued but pushing for more conversation and then he’d asked if Steve wanted to go for a ride with him and actually appeared _into_ the idea, which was all sorts of confusing.

Then shit hit the fan and Steve _was_ getting that ride, but he was in total shock that the something had gotten out of that _fucking_ hellscape ( _the gate was supposed to be closed, the gate had been sealed, no no no_ ) and had chosen to corrupt someone as mundane and normal as Tommy Hader, who was most likely still skipping around the gas station with an army of rats and they were driving in stunned silence and then it hit Steve--

“The cashier!” he yelled before he could stop himself and saw Billy jump next to him.

“There is no way we’re going back,” Billy swore raggedly, giving him a side-eye full of judgement and condemnation. 

“Somebody is in that gas station,” Steve insisted, knowing it was stupid to even imply they should turn the car around. 

“And they can stay there,” Billy snarled, which was venomous until his voice broke at the end. It snapped, gave out, and as the streetlights sent beams of orange light through the windows when they passed, Steve took Hargrove in.

He didn’t look that great, to be honest.

His tawny skin was positively grey in the unforgiving burnt orange glare of the street lamps. He didn’t have a goddamn shirt on under that obnoxious leather jacket and it was nearly _December_ , his cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were a blank, manufactured calm. Then Steve, chewing a thumbnail and trying not to stare too obviously lest Billy fucking shove him out the car while he was driving, began to add a few more things to the list--the heavy breathing, the way when Billy’s hands had stopped clenching the wheel for a minute he could see tremors in them that hadn’t gone away yet.

Steve wanted to turn around for the cashier because he’d realized his favorite causes were generally the lost ones. It felt wrong to leave him, but he didn’t think Billy was gonna make it through another encounter. How...terribly uncharacteristic of him. Someone with his bulk, the cruel glint in his eye, and yet he seemed breakable. Like a glass vase on the edge of a table, about to tip over and shatter on the floor.

He knew that he should think about how Hargrove deserved a little fear from the Upside Down after how nasty he’d been to everyone around him and there was a part of him, not huge but not microscopic either, that agreed.

But.

The other part of him, which could remember humiliating a grieving Jonathan Byers in an alley in front of an audience and recalled vividly spray painting abuse on the movie theater sign, told him to pause. Slow his instinct to dismiss someone as hopeless, without a chance of being anything but what they’d been formed into by the strong, manipulative hands of family and circumstance. 

Steve knew that not everyone got to have a Joyce Byers as a mom or a Jim Hopper as a dad.

But all of those thoughts, the struggle to decide on what exactly to think of Billy Hargrove, was put on hold when he pulled his Camaro over, wrenched open the door, and violently threw up the contents of his stomach--a stream of bile that had to hurt running up the back of his throat.

Steve did the only thing he could think of and stayed quiet, not for one second believing that Billy was the sort who wanted a hand rubbing his back or someone holding back his hair. Especially not from a virtual stranger who he only paid attention to when he felt like throwing his weight around.

None of that changed the fact that even groaning from the agony of an empty stomach which was clenching and convulsing, even with fevered eyes and sweat beading oily on his temples, Billy was an arresting sight. The bun and obviously product-less face should have felt like pulling a curtain back to reveal a tiny, pathetic creature. Instead it felt like Hargrove had told him a secret and made him pinky promise to keep it to himself. 

When Billy finished, Steve rubbed his hands down his pants and proposed, “Hey, let me drive. You’re about one second away from passing out,” and focused hard on not saying things like _Are you okay, buddy, you look rough_ and _Been a pretty long day, huh, with these goddamn monsters,_ that he absolutely would have been asking if this was Dustin.

Billy didn’t look like someone who wanted to make small talk or have a casual chat where he divulged his feelings.

“I won’t have you driving my fucking car, don’t even think about,” warned Billy, but the effect was ruined because he swung the car door closed and hunched over his stomach with his forehead on the steering wheel, a total mess of sickness and exhaustion.

“Look, man, not everything is a personal attack,” Steve said, feeling like they never reached a point where he wasn’t running up against a hedge of thorns trying to get through to Billy Hargrove and a bit exasperated over it, “You shouldn’t be driving. I’m not making fun of you. I’ve--I’ve been there."

And then there it was, as if it had kept a proprietary hand on his shoulder, waiting for the right moment to squeeze and dig in its claws until Steve was caught and impaled by the rottenness of Hawkins’ underbelly. Yes, of course, he remembered his body turning against him with the sourness of a new, fucked up reality crashing over him. He could remember the first time when he’d barged into Jonathan’s house and a monster crept in to slaughter them all.

He’d never say it aloud, but he even remembered the white-hot shock of Nancy holding a gun firm, pointing the barrel at his chest. It could still send a shiver up his spine, if he was honest about it. 

Billy wasn’t going to take any of this well and Steve wasn’t amazing at explaining things, but he couldn’t lie: he felt bad for him. None of this was easy.

Billy breathed loudly through his nose, wanting nothing more than to have the energy to get in Steve’s face so he could demand answers out of him, and asked tonelessly, “Been where, Harrington?”

The unspoken sentiment hung between them: maybe it was time for that talk they'd begun in the parking lot.

Steve’s mouth opened and closed a few times. They were in the parked car and the tension was getting to them both because knew exactly what they'd left behind them. But Billy wasn’t moving despite his fear. Maybe he couldn’t move right now, but there was almost certainly a part of him that _wouldn’t_ move. Not until some things became more clear.

“Hawkins is...weird,” Steve finally began, “Different.”

“That didn’t look different,” Billy shot back, “It looked like it was going to give us the black plague with zombie rats.”

“Okay,” he huffed, “ _Really_ different, asshole. So different it’s not from this world.”

They heard an owl hoot somewhere close from a high branch in the trees and they both jumped, the tension in the car even closer to snapping and it was weirdly gratifying, to see someone else be as scared as he was.

It felt like proof that his frequent nightmares and new tendency to jump if someone snuck up on him weren’t inherent signs of weakness. 

When Billy spoke next, it was so void of emotion Steve thought the words might just be smoke curling out of his mouth, containing nothing and quick to dissipate. 

“Get out,” he said, not looking at Steve. His eyelashes cast shadows on his cheeks in the dark. Steve reared back, eyebrows rising, disbelieving.

“Are you kicking me out?” he all but accused. He wasn’t getting out of this car to face whatever held sovereignty over Tommy’s body even if Billy threatened to pull his teeth out.

“No,” Billy replied, “Just get out. We have to switch. You’re driving.”

Something in the way he said it made Steve aware how thin the ice was that they were on, like Billy so rarely ceded to anyone it was putting fissures in him to do so. It took something from him to do it; Steve saw that clearly. When he thought all of their encounters, he could see how Billy orchestrated the people around him and he wondered for the first time why that was.

More than anything, it looked like it hurt.

So Steve simply nodded, biting his lip softly as Billy stared at him, their faces cast in night shadow and the Camaro free of the scent of cigarette smoke. He’d always assumed Billy smoked in here before school, tobacco smoke sunk into the frame, but that wasn’t the case.

He stepped out of the car and around the hood, passing Billy as they traded places. He slid into the driver’s seat, leather still warm with Billy’s body heat. Thinking it best not to linger within a moment causing the volatile boy next to him visible discomfort, he simply turned the key in the ignition and moved smoothly back onto the deserted country road. 

Moving in the opposite direction of Tommy and the gas station felt good. Steve’s hope was the safety of Hopper’s presence one he felt safe enough to turn the car around. They needed to find him soon and let him know what was happening and hopefully see if the unfortunate cashier had made it out okay.

“So now what? You know about this shit. Don’t make that face, Harrington, you’re too easy to read sometimes.”

Steve rolled his eyes, “I know about, like, half of it. You get the gist, though, there are monsters and they can--possess people. This isn’t the first time.”

“Who was the first?” 

And Steve could now say he knew the face Hargrove made when he was mulling something over. Inspecting it like it was an uncut diamond, covered in prisms that all caught the light differently. In the passenger seat, able to lean back slumped and more comfortable, Billy looked less washed out. It wasn’t an improvement, but he didn’t think it was a regression either. 

Steve tapped a beat out on the steering wheel with his fingers and felt an odd satisfaction, talking to someone who wasn’t in middle school about the terrifying truth of it all. 

“Will Byers.”

Billy pursed his lips and blew out a breath in a long _whoosh_.

“Shit, he’s a runt,” which wasn't nice at all, but the way he said it sounded vaguely concerned as if he couldn’t believe someone so small could handle the thing that already seemed to be ripping Tommy’s body apart.

Steve nodded, “Yeah, he’s a squirt. Tough as shit, though. You wouldn’t think but,” and he shrugged, already acclimating to a conversation with Billy that didn’t involved a wild amount of stupid, macho posturing and he could focus on the easy alto of his voice, sweeter and softer than he'd thought. It was a voice that could croon, all cinnamon and cynicism, and he didn’t hate it.

Silence fell before Steve filled it, “We’re gonna drive around for a while until I stop having a heart attack and then try to make it to the police station. I don't think that thing is gonna eat the town. It's..patient. We just need to talk to Hopper ASAP. You know, honestly, you’re taking all this way better than I did the first time.”

He figured Billy would appreciate knowing what was next, but Billy just hummed in agreement and didn't otherwise respond. He looked over after several moments of quiet, the blond was asleep, head making a hammock out of the seat belt and slumped against the window. Steve heard the lightest of snores and knew he was out. 

And he knew he didn’t have to, knew he didn’t owe it to Billy, but that asshole had just lived through an ambush and he was totally out of it and Steve wasn’t waking him up until he had to. The Camaro purred beneath his hands and he switched the radio to the old blues station that had been on the air since before Steve was born.

A voice accompanied by a scratchy guitar emerged from a throat that sounded torn open and bleeding, singing, _My girl, my girl, don't lie to me. Tell me, where did you sleep last night?_

A shiver through him like clap of thunder and he couldn't stop thinking now that he had the space to, his jaw clenching and unclenching as tears pricked behind his eyes. Fucking Tommy. Just because they weren’t friends anymore didn’t mean Steve didn’t care about him. They’d grown up together--there were pictures of them in floaties holding melting popsicles at the town pool on both their parents’ mantles.

Someone he'd known, someone he loved the way you have to love someone who was so big a part of growing up they practically _were_ your childhood, and he wasn't there anymore. Not really. That fucking thing was now, with Tommy somewhere inside his own body, screaming.

 _In the pines, in the pines where the sun don't ever shine_ , lamented the man through the crackling speakers. He sounded like he was singing through a sheet of rain or the crackle of a fire. Steve felt goosebumps rise in a slow wave down his arms and an anger he'd never felt before rose up his torso and unfurled.

No wonder Dustin had been willing to do anything, get any help he could find no matter how much he was risking by telling more people about the Upside Down, if he felt this way about Will. 

Upside Down didn’t even feel appropriate anymore. It was their world being turned upside down, monsters slithering into young bodies and mutilating them from the inside out. He felt a ball of something--grief? resolve?--like lead in the pit of his belly.

The chorus ended in the man's steely vibrato, _I would shiver the whole night through_ , like he'd climbed out of hell but couldn't shake off its chains. It was an eerie song to be listening to on a long, dark road out of his hometown as he waited for the courage to head right back into the fray. 

It was only when he focused on Hargrove’s steady breathing that he found it in himself to shove down the desperate, gnawing emotions winding around his throat like hydrangea vines. He glanced over at the boy he couldn't have imagined in repose until it was right in front of him, so strangely captivated by the sleepless-night lines razor sharp on his face and his dagger earring gleaming like cat's eyes in the dark. 

.

Billy woke with what he knew was a dehydration headache, like someone turning screws into his temples and a bad taste in his mouth. He’d woken when the Camaro turned off, like his brain knew that when they were in the Camaro and moving, they were leaving bad things and he could rest, but when it shut off it meant he had to face the outside world.

This time, it was Steve who’d driven him away, Steve who had proceeded undeterred while Billy snapped his teeth like a lion with a thorn in its paw, his hackles raising at any provocation, even Harrington's genuine offer of help.

Billy felt the acid-scorch of something like shame over the fact that he’d fallen into sleep like he’d tripped into a yawning ravine of it at the first sign of _not-aloneness_. He didn't want to need anybody, but at the first ambiguous sign of companionship he'd crumbled. His eyes ached. One of his arms had pins and needles in it and he shook it jerkily.

“Morning, sunshine,” Steve murmured to him. It sounded like sarcasm and a careful kind of sweetness, like he knew he shouldn’t but he couldn’t help himself. 

Billy grunted, “Where are we?”

The monstrosity in front of them dripped with wealth and well-off family vibes. It was white, the way all elegant homes were in the movies, and it sprawled tidily across an impeccably landscaped yard. The front entrance was heralded by an arched stairway.

Steve was already sliding out of the car and saying, “My house. C’mon, let’s go. It was closer than the police station. We’re stopping here first.”

Billy was shaking off sleep and he knew he probably looked rough, which annoyed him and made him a bit mean, “For what? You need your morning fix of caviar spoon-fed to you by an army of maids?”

Steve’s quickly opened the front door and walked inside, leaving it wide open for Billy.

“You are such a dick,” was the only response he got, said like Harrington was growing accustomed to him and brushing off his insults. He couldn’t decide how he felt about that, but he did know he wanted in that house as much about as much as he _never_ wanted to step foot on their pristine foyer with his grubby boots as he was doing now.

Steve had taken him home and even though Billy felt the sore muscles in his stomach from heaving bile and terror onto that darkened country road a few hours ago and his hair was so frizzy he was expecting a bird to nest in it, there was a warm feeling in his navel at the thought of being brought here. The only time he went to other people’s houses it was for wild parties everyone had been invited to. He didn’t get personal invites, didn’t just get to go to someone else’s house when the morning sun began to rise in the east and regular people in regular houses got to get up and eat breakfast without wondering what would set their father off over waffles and eggs.

When his host hit the front hallway, he started stripping. Pulling off his sweatshirt and discarding it on the floor like it didn’t matter, that no one was going to scream in his face about making a mess in the house and being disrespectful to his new fucking mother. 

Billy got a good look at his arms as he tore off his layers, the inside lighting letting him see how Steve’s skin tone was warmer than he'd thought, practically olive, and the sort of thick that spoke to sports and yard work. He wasn’t beefy, just boyish and he was beautiful for it. 

“What--” Billy started before Steve spoke over him, yanking off his socks while balancing on one leg and leaning against the wall beside him.

“Keep your pants on, I’m trying to be quick about this,” he said and whipped open a seemingly random door in the hallway. Once Billy entered, he observed what looked like a very nice, very bland hotel room. It didn’t have any personality, was a blank slate yet to be colored in. It looked nothing like Steve, Billy thought, though he hardly knew the first thing about any of his likes and dislikes. He just knew it was true. The bedroom was like a funeral home parlor with its crown molding and dove-gray curtains and nothing speaking to a teenage boy spending time there.

With the small amount he'd seen, Billy thought the whole house was ornate and gorgeous and didn't look lived in at all. Not even this bedroom looked like it ever held a living, breathing occupant.

But Steve obviously knew his way around the room, must have been sleeping in it if the pile of dirty laundry in the corner was any indication, and wasn’t that interesting. Billy noticed there was no noise in the house except for the sounds of Steve hurriedly rummaging through a dresser and tugging on jeans and a new t-shirt, giving Billy a glimpse of belly button and happy trail that left him staring and ready to tug him close by the belt loops

There was one thing on the bedside table, though.

“An X-Men fan, huh,” Billy said, almost to himself it was so low, but Steve caught it and looked over at him as he slid on his sneakers.

Harrington shrugged, somewhere between tense and amused, “Magneto’s always fucking shit up, what can I say,” and then from nowhere he threw a bundle of fabric at him.

Billy caught it against him chest and looked down at it. There was a fresh pair of jeans, a muscle tank, blessedly clean socks, and a navy pair of boxer briefs.

He honestly didn’t know what to say. All of the clothes smelled like _nice_ detergent, not the cheap shit that left clothes starchy, and were soft as fuck. Billy did his own laundry at home, having to do loads at least three times a week. He had three pairs of used Levi’s and a ton of solid button downs and henleys and a slew of white tanks, but he was holding clothes that were so new and so clean that it kind of hurt him to feel them against his fingertips.

“You need a shower,” Steve said. It was new to him, the feeling of someone being kind. He felt off-kilter and oddly wounded. 

Billy sniffed, untensing his shoulders, and tried for a grin, “Oh, fuck you, Harrington, just tell me if you want to see my dick.”

Harrington, now fully dressed, raked a hand through his hair which only rucked it up and made him look like a ridiculous, attractive cockatoo. 

He sighed, “C’mon, dipshit, I’ll show you where the bathroom is,” and then walked out of the room like he was just expecting Billy to follow. Like a pet, some dog he’d found on the street and taken home. 

And Billy wanted to protest, he wanted to make a fuss so big that Harrington never spoke to him again or quirked his pink lips or called him stupid names in his even, pretty tenor, but he fucking _wanted_ that shower and the peace that came with steam and scalding hot water like he wanted to keep breathing air. Like he wanted to follow behind Steve into, quite possibly, anything--the car, the high school hallways, even the darkness of the Hawkins treeline, if it meant Steve would keep talking to him and lending him clothes and letting him nap in the Camaro before he started crying from fear and exhaustion like a total pussy.

Which was how he found himself stripping down in the nicest bathroom he’d ever been inside in his life, thankful for the leather jacket he’d chosen because it would be warm against the bracing chill of near-December in Indiana, especially with a shirt underneath it this time.

He took a longer shower than he usually would, figuring Steve’s parents could more than foot the bill for ten minutes of hot water, and he dressed quickly. The jeans were tight, but that was his preferred style anyway and he thought these might be Harrington’s biggest pair. The shirt fit well, which gave him a moment of pause, but realized it was most likely a baggy house shirt for Steve. The sleeves were like gloves on his biceps and so soft he wanted to cry a bit, hating rich people but wanting all their shit. 

His hair was gonna just have to be unstyled, which meant it’d be wild and curly in way that was less sexy and shaped and more innocent and frazzled. He slid his boots on and his jacket on and the mirror in front of him said he looked damn good. It improved his mood a little, having washed off the stress-sweat and layers of unadulterated shock.

He wandered around the first floor until he found the kitchen where Steve was waiting for him with hot strawberry pop tarts, two for each of them, and glasses of apple juice.

Halfway through the juice he looked at the counter next to them and did a double take.

“You’re planning to murder me,” he said, half-joking, genuinely shocked at what he saw, “It’s always the fuckin’ quiet ones, isn’t it, Harrington,” and it wasn’t a question.

“I’m not quiet,” Steve said, “And I don’t have the energy to murder someone right now. These are for us. Bat’s mine, okay, so you can’t call dibs.”

“You’re…” Billy started, feeling the warmth in his navel blaze into a fire and all he wanted to do was get his hands on Steve’s hips, his solid steady shoulders, breathe in the space right below his perfect jaw, “...you’re arming us. Harrington, that is a fucking nail bat and a fucking sledge hammer.”

Steve’s jaw ticked then, like he was suppressing another, more genuine reaction.

He replied, “You saw what happened back there, with Tommy--,” and it looked like he was hurting for a second before he seemed to beat back the fresh pain, “Don’t freak out. I mean, do freak out, but don’t punch me, man, because there’s more of them. That thing has minions.”

Billy was finally awake enough to shake his head slowly and say, “I have no fucking idea what’s going on.”

“Get used to that feeling. It’s not going away anytime soon,” is what Steve replied before stuffing half a pop tart in his mouth.

And that’s when it hit him, the whole night and Tommy and not-Carol’s big moon eyes and bleeding mouth and the police station and then the goddamn gas station, and he was staring at Steve and he was not, under any circumstances, waiting one more _fucking_ minute to know exactly what was happening. Fuck wading through all these half-truths from Harrington.

He was clean and had food in his belly, and the sun was beginning to rise so Steve must have driven for hours as he slept, and maybe Steve thought that meant he was protected from Billy’s monstrous side but he needed to learn _fast_ that _no one_ was exempt from leaving him the in dark to shiver in shameful fear. 

Steve clocked the change in his posture, saw a glint return to his eyes, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then Billy was stepping forward with a soft look on his face that promised retribution for things that ultimately weren’t Steve's fault. 

But he was there, like he always was when Billy felt too much and needed to _put it_ somewhere. 

The sun had come up just a little and in the faint morning light Billy could imagine what it would be like to wake up beside him, the way whispers of sun framed his eyes so deep-set and kind, and it just made him angrier.

“It told me it was going to be me,” he snarled at Steve who looked surprised and then very worried, “Yeah, Tommy was at Theresa’s party when he went to go make out with some bitch in the fucking woods like a shithead. She came out bleeding and squealing like a pig. He came out--different. You saw it. It told me it was supposed to be _me_. So you had better start fucking talking because your vague bullshit answers are really starting to piss me off.”

And then something surprising happened. Steve stepped right up to him, closing the distance between them and snarling right back.

“I don’t know how to explain shit to you or how much I can explain because it’s _not my call_ . Hopper’s involved, the Byers, those dumb ass kids you scared so bad, and your sister. There’s monsters from another fucking dimension or, fuck, somewhere _shitty_. They’re trying to get in. And I didn’t know how you were going to take that and I was worried you were going to beat me into unconsciousness again,” Steve said, his voice getting lower and his eyes snapping with electricity. It wasn’t electric violence; it was fear and worry and anger all rolled into one.

“And if you do that again,” he swore, a vicious promise, “If you do that to me again, this is done. Whatever truce we have going on, that’s over. Don’t expect answers. You beat me to a pulp and I get the angle you’re going for. I fucking understand finding Max in a house surrounded by guys, but it wasn’t that at the end and you know it.”

Steve got so close Billy could see each individual eyelash, saw his chapped lips and the hollow of his throat in high definition that pinned him to the spot.

“And you know I know it,” he continued, “You looked at me and didn’t see me. I don’t know if you saw anyone.”

Billy had never been so thoroughly confronted by someone who wasn’t about to shove him into a wall. He didn’t know the right response for this. And he didn’t think Harrington was ever going to talk about what happened at the Byers’ house ever, because they hadn’t really done that thus far. 

He’d been gearing up to go ballistic on him. But suddenly Steve was demanding equal ground. He wanted Billy without the bullshit, the excuse of his fist-swinging temper. Looking at his scabbed eye, the swollen bump on his nose--things Billy had inflicted on him, abuse Billy heaped on him like throwing stones at a passerby, he wanted--something. He didn’t know what, but he wanted something between himself and the boy who’d fed and clothed him that didn’t involve the anger that Neil gave him and which infiltrated every aspect of his life.

But he just couldn’t. Not even for Harrington. 

“Fuck you, Harrington,” Billy said after a withering pause where they stared each other as the birds began to chirp outside, “Nobody fucking tells me what to do.”

And Steve just looked at him. Dead in the eye. Waiting.

He rolled his eyes and added, “I already kicked the shit out of you once. Been there, done that. It would be boring to do it again. Stop fucking around and do something useful. We don't have all day.”

Steve nodded like he'd said something more appeasing. Maybe he had.

Then he casually gestured towards the long-handled sledge hammer on his kitchen counter like he did it everyday and said, “Grab it. It’s time to go.”

  
  
  



	5. beyond the serene harbor, the future lethal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Billy's back behind the driver's seat and ready to take on Hawkins while having feelings at his new partner, Steve's got a type, and Will Byers has the strangest way of hitchhiking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a fun psa: uh, so Billy's '79 Camaro doesn't have a backseat in canon and I hate to mess with perfection, but please note that in this fic his car *does* have a backseat. I forgot, but then I was watching S2 and remembered and I'm sorry, but things have to be this way.

Billy considered the tool that laid menacing and heavy across his lap. It consisted of an elongated, slender stem that led up to a double-sided hammer, the iron mottled with age but sturdy. Intimidating. Humming with kinetic energy, ready to fucking _hit_ something, the way Billy felt like he always was when he was showering and trying to wash off the phantom impact of his father’s fists. He would run the water far too hot so that his body hurt all over. 

In those moments, when no one was around to sink his teeth into, he felt the most dangerous--like there was a bundle of live wires inside him that had been severed right down the middle and they were sparking wildly and without any discrimination of what they touched. 

What they scorched and burned.

The hammer felt like a mirror in his hands, no longer trembling but tightening until the skin over his knuckles whitened as they pulled tight and taut. He couldn’t believe Steve had given it to him without knowing for sure what Billy would do with it. 

Even after the night they’d just had, he couldn’t imagine Steve felt his busted face any less after their night drive through a suddenly wild and unknowable county, filled with trees that could be hiding anything. 

He thought about the whistle of wind at the swing of a hammer. He thought about Tommy’s ruined mouth spewing sickly laughter as a rat so decayed it was exposing ribs ran up his cheek; there was the unfathomable sight of the seething sea of vermin that poured from beneath his shirt. He thought about Steve’s unexpected kindness and his unexpected confrontation and wondered at Steve's ability to be so vulnerable.

And there wasn’t time to think about Steve behind the wheel as Billy slept harder than he had in months and how the fresh, minty smell of Steve’s shampoo tickled his fucking nose whenever his unruly curls brushed his forehead. There wasn’t any time at all to think about the strange boy next to him in his car, working up the courage to turn the key in the ignition and head back to town.

Steve broke the silence just as it felt like time had stopped.

“Did you quote  _The Terminator_ at me at the gas station?” he asked suddenly, and Billy’s ears burned.

He drawled, staring straight ahead through the windshield, “Did you get in the car and not die? Remind me what happened there, princess, I’ve forgotten already.”

“You did,” Steve smiled tiredly and with the faintest spark of excitement, “Don’t act like you’re too cool for sci-fi.”

Billy scoffed, “I thought you were big man on campus. Too cool is supposed to be your territory.”

“Fuck that,” laughed Steve, “Henderson keeps dragging me to movies. What am I supposed to do, close my eyes in the theater?”

Billy rubbed his fingers into his temples in meditative, circular motions and peered over at his companion.

He said, “God, your weird-ass relationship with those brats makes way more sense now.”

Steve rolled his eyes, but appeared to think over Billy’s statement. The sun was rising higher now and it was almost 7 AM, a much more acceptable time to roll into the that godforsaken police station. Billy had pop tarts in his belly, a couple hours of sleep, and he wasn’t alone. 

Things were looking bad for the town, but things were also looking up. For him. Personally. It made him nervous as hell, but he tried to enjoy things as fully as possible before they were inevitably snatched away from him; so he was _savoring_ this.

“Those kids are braver than anyone I’ve ever met. They faced monsters in some fucking tunnels that were _alive_ and then they went to the Snow Ball afterwards. So yeah,” he said, “I got a soft spot for ‘em.”

“I don’t know,” Billy said, the smallest smile quirking on his mouth and his eyes fixed on the hammer, “Seems like you’re just soft, Harrington.”

“Okay, asshat,” Steve replied, “Let’s just go, okay? Tommy’s on the loose and we really need to talk to Hopper.”

Billy laughed sarcastically, “Yeah, alright. Last name basis with the cops, huh? You’re doing all the talking then. Whenever I talk to police, it doesn’t go so well.”

With that, he started the engine and peeled out of Steve’s driveway as Harrington frowned underneath his curtain of brown hair. Driving through Harrington's neighborhood felt like peeking in on an alien species. He knew what wealthy people looked like shopping at the mall, weighed down by bags of expensive purchases. He knew what they smelled like now, the memory of being in Steve’s shower fresh in his mind and not fading anytime soon. He knew what they sounded like, their voices condescending to Billy’s scruffiness and his messy hair and his hard-cut eyes. 

They looked at him like he was a drooling animal, so far beneath them he didn’t register as human, and now he was in their little colony, a neighborhood full of Harringtons (though the rest of the houses actually seemed to have occupants). It was bizarre to think about.

It was a fairly quiet drive. They both had a lot to process and they’d never been this close to each other without Billy dragging Steve headfirst into an argument. Billy didn’t mind. He spent a lot of time at school wandering the hallways with a cocky look on his face as people who thought they wanted to know him tried and failed to get his attention. When he was home, he spent as much time as possible in his room where Neil couldn’t find something wrong with what he was doing--which only _usually_ worked because sometimes his old man was spoiling for a fight and he would swing the bedroom door open with a feral look on his face right before Billy took a jab to the ribs. 

Loneliness came and went, but aloneness was constant like it was one of Billy’s personality traits--sharp, aggressive, cocky, quick-tempered, _isolated_. California was something all these country folk thought was incredible, like he was from some booming LA paradise instead of just another sun-washed, beachy suburb. If he were from any other family, maybe it would have been different. Maybe it would have been okay.

But he wasn’t. And now he was here in Indiana living out a horror show with a pretty, rich boy riding bitch in his Camaro. 

“So what the fuck do people do in this town, Harrington? I’m getting the impression it’s just a lot of goat-fucking and barn parties,” Billy asked Steve as a grin started to creep onto his face. He was beginning to feel more himself now that he’d thought through the situation. 

Steve scrubbed a hand over his head, mussing it up something fierce, and answered wryly, “Nah, not enough goats for that. There’s way less farmers here than you think, man. This is not even close to as country as it gets in Indy.”

Billy wanted to close his eyes so he could better hear the nuances in Steve’s voice. There was just something about him. He didn’t want to play rough...but he _would_ play. He didn’t feed off Billy’s terror and his anger that had him pushing guys into the dirt as his vision went scarlet with violence--not like the girls at parties who wanted to sink their mouths onto his dick after a brawl. 

Steve was more likely to respond to calm and sarcastic than he was to feed off the screaming inside Billy that never really turned off.

“Charming,” he said, “And that’s too bad. Rich boy like you could probably afford a quality goat.”

“ _Har-har_ ,” Steve said under his breath and then spoke up, “Not exactly my type.”

Here, Billy chanced a glance at him. Harrington had clearly survived a sleepless night, but his hair looked soft and so did his mouth. Nothing was tense about him for a moment, which was around the time Billy realized Steve looked tense a lot. Maybe almost as much as him, just quieter. Less furious.

He wanted to keep Steve in this moment--where neither of them had to go to dark places they’d been before and would be again. Steve couldn’t have been taking the whole monsters reappearing thing that well despite appearances.

He chuckled, wanting to hold onto the mood, “Then what is your type?”

The boy next to him fiddled with his fingers and his hair and the drawstring on his hoodie. Sunlight chased a line of light across his cheeks and now that Billy had noticed, he couldn’t unsee how Steve’s skin was all warm tones, even golden where the light hit.

His hands were big and his arms were athletic. Slender, sure, but Billy had felt his punches. If he hadn’t spent his whole fucking life taking licks and if Steve ever learned how to plant his goddamn feet, well, maybe that night would have turned out differently.

“I-- _oh fuck off_ \--well,” Steve said, stuttering through trying to brush off the question and being kind of helpless towards a person taking an interest in him, in what he thought. In who he was.

Billy could see the loneliness in him, too. Harrington really _was_ transparent when he let his guard down and interacted with Billy the same way he did everyone else. 

Steve continued, “What anyone wants. Someone who’ll stick around,” and then he mumbled something to himself.

He should have known better than to mumble in front of Billy, who had always been the sort of person to turn down the radio's volume and say obnoxiously, “What was that, Harrington!? Music musta been too loud!”

“I said ‘blue eyes,’ asshole. Jesus, Hargrove--what are you, my mother?” Steve replied, sheepish and annoyed and a little amused. 

“Sure hope not,” shot back Billy, “Or showering next to you just got real fucked up.”

They’d passed a few more neighborhoods by now. Steve assured them getting to downtown Hawkins wouldn’t take longer than ten minutes. It was woods and then houses and woods and then houses. It should have been monotonous to drive past, but both of them became more and more alert the closer they came to the squat, drab buildings that marked downtown.

Steve never responded. He was staring out the window, scanning the area, which felt ridiculous because they were in Bumfuck, Indiana, and it should have been another boring, meaningless day in the lives of its residents. Instead, he was worried about...whatever Tommy was.

Billy watched as Steve’s grip on the handle of the bat tightened until it looked painful and he could only imagine how the wood felt against the blisters he’d seen on Harrington’s palms in the parking lot. 

He felt jumpy as hell and it was complicated further when a boy ran out in the road just as he turned away from Steve to focus on driving. He slammed on the breaks when the fucking crazy kid spread his skinny arms out wide like he wouldn’t let them pass, missing collision by a few inches. A hairsbreadth of space that set him the fuck off. 

Billy rolled the window down so fast he thought his head was spinning as he yelled, “What _the_ _fuck_? Are you _insane_ , dipshit? I could have run you over!”

And then he felt that rage build, the anger that never truly receded, except this time he was mad that someone could have been hurt. He didn’t want to hurt this kid and the shitbird practically ran himself over with Billy’s car. 

He turned off the car and threw open the door, intending to stomp over so he could yell at the boy from a closer vantage point. But then Steve was out of the Camaro and ahead of him, scrambling over to the kid and kneeling on the concrete because he was just sitting on the road now, staring blankly and ass planted right on the yellow dots, and Steve was putting his hands on his shoulders.

“Hey, Will. Will, buddy, can you hear me?” he asked, calm and direct, never looking away from the boy's spooky, emotionless face. 

And then Billy finally recognized him. With all the adrenaline rushing through him, he hadn’t even really made out facial features. 

“...Will Byers,” Billy said softly, the fight having run out of him the minute Steve grabbed hold of Will.

The kid didn’t answer Steve, who was still trying to gently get him to respond. 

No, Will looked Billy straight in the eye after staring blankly into space for a couple more minutes, his eyes round and shadowed as a cave's mouth and full of secrets, and he said, “It was supposed to be you.”

Then Will Byers, zombie boy and alive boy and boy whose words echoed a monster’s Billy met one time on the edge of a dark forest, passed out in the middle of the road on a Saturday morning as Indiana's winter birds sang--the cardinals and jays and goldfinches a sweet chorus of sound in the midst of a dawning, great, and expanding fear.

-

Steve knew the second Will ran into the street and in front of the car that this wasn’t going to end well. He’d spent a lot of time when he and Nancy started dating pretending that he wasn’t involved in this, that it wasn’t his problem, and that everything would be fine as long as he was grateful to be alive and halfway through high school. Nancy--well, Nancy hadn’t felt that way at all. She’d grown tired of him fucking faking it the way he faked it with everyone. His parents pretended like their absences were fucking _fine_ and he was supposed to, too. None of his friends ever gave a fuck about anything so he was supposed to fucking pretend _he_ didn’t give a fuck about anything, too. 

And Nancy had been the first person to express to him that that was wrong. She’d been the first person in his life to reject his façade and he hadn’t taken it well and then it was like once torn open, it had been utterly torn asunder. And all these feelings and _emotions_ and the stupid fucking craving for a real connection to another person had bubbled up in him like it had been there all along, waiting for the chance to break the surface.

But he hadn't been able to get that from Nancy despite her being the person to start the change in him.

Him and Nancy--they hadn’t been good together. She didn’t--she didn’t like his easygoing nature, not really. She didn’t have the patience for someone like him, someone who didn’t put everything together as quickly as her and who could feel things deeply but was completely unable to keep them  _quiet_. He wasn’t any good at it, the concealment, once he began to care for someone.

The kids had proven that. He and Dustin hung out every week now. He and the kids saw each other at least once every two. They played games and sometimes he tried to join in until he realized he was just sort of content to sit there nursing a coke and asking questions that made all of the brats scoff in disbelief. Now if they went to the arcade, he was steadily kicking ass at Pac-Man since he’d started playing. And they jostled and heckled him just like they did to each other and that...felt really nice.

He was attached. Sue him.

And he truly meant it. Whoever thought his loyalty to a group of radio-carrying, mouth-breathing, pimply, awkward nerds was weird could honestly go fuck themselves. They were twice the company of pretty much anyone in his grade. They'd lived through more and fought harder than anyone he'd ever known and watching their devotion to each other made him feel practically goddamn _maternal_. Turns out Real Steve was a bit of a sap and he was learning to be good with that. He was trying...not to lead a bullshit life. It meant, in new and awful ways, that things weren’t going okay and he had to accept it. It meant some things made him feel happy and goofy and dorky and good and he got to accept that, too.

Dustin and Will and Mike and Lucas and Max were _real_. But that meant his life alone at the house his family hardly visited--that shit was real, too. Nancy and Jonathan, they were real and good and they shared between them a quiet and serious love, kinda boring in his opinion, but it was a healthy thing to witness once seeing them together stopped stinging so damn much.

His life was much fuller and much emptier simultaneously. Steve felt the weight of it sometimes when he couldn’t sleep and the house felt too quiet and too big and before he knew it he was sliding on sweats and wandering out the front door. Steve tried not to to share that part of himself with other people because he felt like it was stupid and he had no right to feel fucking traumatized when other people had it so much worse. He didn't think he'd be able to let anyone comfort him anyway and it stung, but it made him realize that no ever had, really--comforted him. He didn't know how to do it, didn't know how to take it, and mostly figured he'd keep it all to himself until it finally just went away at some point.

Mostly, he just wanted everyone safe. He wanted everyone safe and happy and stealing quarters from their sisters for the arcade and eating too much pizza. But when Will ran into the street, Steve knew whatever had been defeated was merely a false victory. Tommy had been scary and confusing and suggestive of the truth, but Will's appearance drove it home. It had never gone away.

It had been biding its timing. Waiting.

He held Will Byers--shy, big-eyed Will who had narrow shoulders and glossy brown hair, who was delicate somehow after everything--and kept trying to get a response. Finally, he’d spoken. But it had been to Billy, just a chilling sentence that caused all the blood to drain from his face, and he’d fucking fainted. The Upside Down clung to everything it touched until it killed it, but Will Byers had survived it twice. It had taken dominion of his body, coated his insides with rot and decay, and he'd made it out alive. Watchful and withdrawn, but pink-cheeked and alive nonetheless. And here Steve was, remembering vividly what they'd faced and wondering how any of them had ever believed a thing that powerful and dark would just disappear and forget what it thought belonged to it. Including one dark-eyed boy who'd seen too much.

Steve felt his face contort.

“Fuck,” he swore, “Fuck. Buddy, you okay? C’mon, Will, open your eyes. Please.”

Will was in his lap, a light weight because he was so damn skinny, and he looked up at Billy who’d regained his composure so fast it impressed Steve. He'd noticed how quickly Billy had taken to their situation, how there were brief moments of _no-effing-way_ that merely interrupted his ability to roll with the punches. He thought--very, very quietly--that his adaptability was a little bit admirable.

“We're taking him with us,” Steve said. His mind was blanking and he’d never been the best strategist. At this point, safety meant Hopper was involved and making decisions. He thought that a man who could keep a little girl who’d been a lab experiment concealed for a year and who was the only person to intimidate those sick fucks from the lab could probably take care of Will. 

Billy’s jaw had gone tight and he countered, “The cops aren't gonna be able to do shit for him. He needs a doctor.”

Steve just looked up at him, “The doctors who could deal with this weird Upside Down shit are dead already. We just need Hopper. Nobody else there can know.”

His stomach turned, the sugary jam in his breakfast lurching suddenly inside him. Sick fucks or not, he’d never forget the bodies left in the wake of the Mind Flayer. The tunnels had been crushing and made him feel like he was drowning, held captive in the the belly of a decomposing whale, but the sheer body count from the lab terrified him. Sometimes he thought the younger kids were so resilient because they were still grasping the magnitude of what was happening in Hawkins. They called the woods _Mirkwood_ and they named each disfigured, man-eating, interdimensional creature a name they knew from playing _Dungeons and Dragons_. Steve wasn't sure they really got it sometimes.

Staring into Billy's serious, feverishly blue eyes calmed him down a little. Violent, aggressive, irritating Billy got it. He got it like Steve did. And he didn't seem so violent or aggressive now.

Billy’s eyes widened and he swallowed, “Okay. Okay. Let’s go to the station,” and he sounded resolved. His gaze had gotten harder, colder, but he didn’t seem to be directing it at Steve in anger. There was relief in that knowledge. 

As gently as he could, he maneuvered Will’s limp frame so that he could stand up and then crouched as he hefted his skinny ass over his shoulder. He didn’t like the sensation of one of his favorite dipshits hanging there, his head brushing against Steve's back. He didn't want this. He didn't want any of this, but he refused to let Will wake up without anyone he knew there to tell him that it was okay. That even though they weren't that close, Steve wasn't going anywhere.

 _Ah_ , and there it was, the adrenaline kicking in to jolt him into action. He felt the panic he’d grown used to blowing hot helium into his chest. It was scary. It was grounding.

Walking back to the Camaro, he called behind him, “Open the door, Billy.”

And damn if Billy didn’t have one goddamn smartass thing to say. He just opened the door, efficient as anything. It was when dozens of rats spilled out from the car floor and the backseat that they both jumped back and yelped. Up close, the rats had a smell. It was so many things at once--putrid shit and sun-baked vomit and dirty laundry and something sensory-crossing like the sort of wet sobbing when snot gets everywhere and mixes with the scent of nervous sweat. They kept pouring out in a wave of stench and chatter. They seemed to be circling him and Billy, with him clutching an unconscious Will as fear burned a blue flame through his entire body.

He was frozen, just watching the hoard multiply and surround them when Billy flung open the driver's side door, reached in and grabbed their hammer and bat, and began swinging the bat through the wave of animals threatening to overwhelm them. There was a multitude of pus-popping squelches as the nails impaled some of them and they shrieked, ugly and shrill, as they died. The other rats scurried away just long enough for Billy to grab Steve's wrist in a calloused, sure grip and propel them forward. 

"Harrington, I need a location. Tell me where to go," Billy yelled as he yanked Steve and Will forward and ahead of him. He took the rear and swung the bat behind them with one hand, holding the hammer in the other. Steve didn't have the time to look back, but he could hear more rats get struck by the sharp nails. Billy was asking him to make a plan, trusting him to get them all to safety. Steve wanted to keep them alive and he knew he wasn't a genius, but all he had to do was think of a safe place nearby. Just a safe place. Somewhere they could phone for help. 

"A safe place, a safe place," Steve chanted to himself like a crazy person, trying to knock the right destination out of his head. 

They were a good five minutes by car away from downtown so that was out. Will's house would be ideal and contained people experienced in dealing with this, but it was too far out of the way, and Steve didn't even fucking know how Will had walked that far in the cold to begin with. _Okay_ , he thought, thinking of other people who knew about the Upside Down or were at least close to people who knew--Dustin's mom was out, the Sinclair family was out, but people were coming in and out of the Wheeler's house constantly and it was-- _yes--_ ridiculously fortuitous that their neighborhood's entrance was thirty feet ahead of them. 

Steve couldn't hear the rats anymore, but he could hear Billy breathing and running behind him. 

"The Wheelers," Steve panted as Will became heavier, "Their neighborhood is right there."

Behind him, Billy panted back, "What are we going to do when we get there?"

Steve kept running, kept gripping Will, kept getting distance between them and those fucking rats, "I don't know. Play it cool."

" _Play it cool?_ " Billy asked him like he was an undisputed dumbass, the expression on his face asking Steve to really ponder the scene they made with Will Byers passed out and swinging from his shoulder and Billy beside him holding two weapons that looked like they belonged to a serial killer. 

But Steve just nodded to himself, plan made.

"Yep," he replied, "Play it cool."


	6. what do we have to appease the great forces?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Billy and Steve hang out at the Wheeler's residence, Karen thought a raccoon was the worst of her troubles, Hopper is ready for the sweet release of death or at least a nap, and nothing can ever go back to the way it was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter tortured me for what felt like an eternity. But here it is.

Billy wanted to go back and murder every single one of those nasty motherfuckers. They had infiltrated his car. His baby. It meant everything to him, from a vehicle to a bed to a sanctuary. It was his home in so many more ways than the place Neil made him live, crates propping up the full length mirror he’d seen a neighbor put out with the trash years ago and swiped that very same evening. 

He'd bought the Camaro off a guy in San Fran for way cheaper than it deserved using the grill cook’s money he’d saved and hidden away until the time was right. He'd driven it home knowing it was going to need a bit of work, but that hadn't bothered him one bit. He'd seen the potential for his first stab at independence from his father. He knew he could fix the unfortunate noises it emitted whenever he pressed on the brakes. All he needed was a book from the library and a bit of elbow grease.

That was the first time Neil seemed proud of him. In years. He’d driven that banged up car into the driveway and his old man had sucked a little on his cigar as he watched from a rocking chair on the front porch and cracked a goddamn smile. Neil hadn’t touched him for weeks while Billy was working on it. 

It hadn’t lasted and Billy knew better than to think it would, but it had been the sweetest of reprieves. From then on the Camaro symbolized shelter to him. First and temporarily from his father’s abuse and then from the rain and the empty feeling he got when he stood still for too long and felt like he was waiting for something to go terribly wrong.

So seeing the Camaro covered in demon rats who looked like they’d risen from the grave, dripping viscous fluid everywhere, making the worst noises he’d ever heard--that pissed him off. Then they’d tried to circle him and Steve and he’d really  _had it_ with them. If those shit stains thought they were gonna get close enough to touch Harrington’s fucking shoe lace, they had another thing coming.

Billy knew he was smart, knew he was resourceful, but more than anything the violence came easiest. It was a lost language that all the preppy, shiny kids around him and their preppy, shiny families had forgotten but that he’d been forged in. He'd been manually bent into the shape he was today and he didn't have to ask if he was full of sharp edges because he could feel them, always, pressing against his skin. Killing those things, turning fear into resolve? He’d practically been born to do it.

He impaled them and pulled Steve along with the Byers kids hanging off him. Billy didn’t want anyone to die here, but he would push Byers off Harrington if it came right down to it and the boy was weighing him down. Fuck the hatred that would follow, fuck the consequences because the brunette next to him stayed  _alive_. Even if Billy couldn’t have him, he could stand in the way of things that would try to take him away.

Following behind that dumbass, listening to him pant and grunt with Will on his shoulder and showing no signs of slowing, Billy glad it was him he’d been stuck with. Glad it had been him at the gas station with a bag of gummies and a soft drink and hands that didn’t shake as much as Billy’s. He’d fed him, clothed him, let him sleep. 

It was more thoughtfulness and care than even his mother had shown him, at the end. It was hard to process, but there was a sure, strong core of compassion inside Steve that made him brave and made him way too soft and made him reluctant to share much of himself with others. And it drove Billy crazy. Made him feel warm and then ashamed of that warmth because. Well.

All Billy had to offer in return was this: the lethal swing of a bat. The slam of a hammer. It might be enough to keep him safe, but everything Billy knew how to say he only knew how to say through pain and even with his limited experience, he was well aware that nothing healthy came out of that.

“Yup,” Steve had responded to him, “Play it cool.”

Running through the neighborhood this early, it was blessedly silent. No one in bathrobes coming out to get the paper in slippers. No one cutting the grass or turning on sprinklers yet. Thank god it was a Saturday morning, the first real day of the weekend when adults indulged and slept that extra sacred hour until eight. 

The Wheeler's residence was a two-story, neat structure, not opulent like Steve’s austere castle, but nothing to scoff at. It was a brick house where everyone probably ate home cooked meals together everyday, siblings squabbling over waffles like a sitcom. Not realizing how good they had it.

Billy thought for sure seeing the house would trip Steve up for several reasons. His ex lived there. He was holding one of the Wheeler kid’s best friends. They were sweating profusely. Honestly, it looked  _bad_  and if Billy had been alone he would have known better than to let anyone see him appearing suspicious. He looked too different, too rebellious. He had a face that made adults want to punish him and a special tone of voice he reserved for occasions when he was really trying to push someone's buttons.

But no, dumbass Steve Harrington with his big fucking doe eyes and his flippy hair and soft face just jogged up to the front door and knocked, just short of frantic. 

It didn’t take long for the door to swing open in the fucking weirdest déjà vu moment ever. Mrs. Wheeler opened it, as mature and pretty as she was the night Billy stopped by for information on Maxine, surprised to see them standing there.

Then the parallels broke because she took in Will, barely glancing at Billy who was holding the hammer and the bat behind his legs as casually as possible, and exclaimed, “Oh god, Steve! Is that Will? Will, honey, oh god, come inside. Come!”

She ushered Steve in and left the door open so Billy could follow. As delicately as he could, he laid his and Steve’s weapons behind a flower bush by the door and stepped into the Wheeler's residence ready to talk if his companion became tongue-tied.

He wasn’t great at being anything but defensive and kind of a dick, but experience had proven Mrs. Wheeler was susceptible to the only kind of verbal manipulation he could manage. If Steve couldn't handle it, which felt unlikely but had to be considered, Billy would step in.

He noticed there was a smell in the house, a faint but pervasive scent that had infiltrated every nook and cranny, that spread across every floor like peacock feathers. If Steve's face was any indication, he'd noticed, too, but they weren't here to quiz Mrs. Wheeler about the state her home. It wasn't his business and, if he had his way, they'd be out of here in an hour. 

They were led into the living room where a tan, itchy, wool couch sat vacant before Mrs. Wheeler fluttered around Steve as he laid Will down. Billy thought now Steve would start making excuses and spinning tall tales, but he didn’t. He did something Billy, with his inability to be relaxed and in the moment and sincerely good-with-people, would never have done: he ignored the expected conversation at hand to turn his full attention and concern towards Byers. Karen was standing there, looking scared and waiting, and Steve wasn't even looking at her.

He knelt next to Will and squeezed his arm, giving him a once over that would have made a pediatrician proud.

“Sorry to barge in on you like this,” Steve apologized, finally looking away from Will towards their upset and confused host, “Mrs. Wheeler, could you get a wet cloth? I’ll explain, just. Please.”

Steve wasn’t even panicking, as if they hadn’t made a desperate break for it and there weren’t a couple rats still shish-kabobbed on the bat that Billy hadn’t been able to shake off. He was collected and staring down at Will’s face with a soft expression. He was  _genuinely_  fucking concerned, concerned enough that he hadn’t launched into a lie with Mrs. Wheeler. She searched his face, on the verge of speaking but silent and searching for something when he returned her stare. She must have found it because, within a minute or so, she gave a sharp nod and left the room in a hurry.

She quickly returned from wherever she’d gotten the washcloth, damp and warm, which she placed herself on Will’s forehead. 

“What happened?” she asked in a near-whisper, as if afraid to disturb the Byers boy like he was just sleeping instead of making cryptic comments after almost committing suicide à la Camaro and fainting in the middle of the road.

Steve leaned back so that she could get closer to Will as she clearly wanted to inspect him herself.

He said, “We just saw him on the side of the road. He was so out of it. I think he was in a daze, then he fell to the ground. Your house was the close so we ran over.”

“What was he doing out there?” she breathed in response.

Billy decided it might be time to enter the conversation. Being quiet and menacing wasn’t a good look for him in the eyes of his elders.

“We don’t know,” he said plainly, watching as Mrs. Wheeler turned towards him with thankfully zero interest. Billy wasn’t above exploiting the interest of older women in conversation, but he was glad to see she wasn't interested in going further than one-time exploitative flirting. 

She nodded at him and turned back to Will, jostling him lightly. Like a mother would, which made sense if he and the Wheeler brat were close friends. Seeing the maternal tenderness, though, that made his chest twinge. Billy didn't think she was a bad person, her attraction to a teenage boy not withstanding because Billy knew he looked like a dirty little secret to the soccer moms of the world. She also, like fucking everyone in this town, seemed to take people at face value and believe them. It was like nothing bad had ever happened to anyone here and it made them a little innocent. And Billy wanted to think it was also a little pathetic, but that's not what he felt and he was glad no one knew what he was thinking. He wasn't much used to feeling understanding towards anyone.

There was a pause, the tension in the room easing, and then Karen spoke.

"Sorry about the smell. I drew the short stick so I'm waiting for the exterminator to get here. We think a raccoon got in last night and died in one of the vents. I'm taking one for the team. Ted and the kids are out until dinner," she said with tiny smile, as if being in a stinky house alone and waiting for a wildlife professional to locate the dead animal in her house was simply a bad joke. Billy had never had a good parent, not since his mom left (and maybe a little before that, if he was being honest), but he thought Karen might be one.

“Will,” she said, low and sweet, ruffling his bangs like she'd done it a thousand times, “Will, honey. Wake up.”

Steve smiled, tiny and rueful, “That hasn’t worked yet. Do you mind if I borrow your phone, Mrs. Wheeler? I’m gonna call his mom.”

“Yes,” she said immediately, “Do that. Joyce has to know. Call an ambulance while you’re at it, will you, Stevie?”

Steve looked embarrassed, especially when Billy caught his eye and mouthed “Stevie” with a smirk on his face. They both knew that that was going to be revisited later. 

Then he nodded, got up, and gestured for Billy to follow him into the hallway and presumably to a telephone. It was easy to see that Steve was a parent-approved boyfriend of Nancy’s just by the way Mrs. Wheeler spoke to him, like he was kind of precious. She obviously didn’t know about the notches on his bedpost or his tendency towards graffiti when he threw a petty tantrum. Steve knew the layout of his ex’s house well enough to navigate them to a phone located on a side table in the kitchen.

“I thought you were going to call the chief,” Billy reminded him. Not that he particularly wanted to be up close and personal with the guy, but Steve seemed to believe that he could handle--to a degree Billy couldn’t check for sure--the monsters who’d made a comeback and that made him potentially useful.

“Mrs. Byers,” Steve shook his head like he was remembering a conversation he’d had with the woman in question, “I mean,  _Joyce_  needs to know about Will. Honestly, she’s just as ballsy as Hopper. She’s the reason Will’s even alive in the first place, she just never gave up on him when he disappeared.”

“And that was the first time the monsters came?” Billy asked, slowly starting to piece a timeline together.

“Yeah,” Steve confirmed, “That was the first time. Will was found after he’d been trapped in the monster’s world. When he came home, that’s when he got possessed by--well, the kids called it the Mind Flayer. Some D&D name.”

“They named that thing in that’s in Tommy now,” Billy quickly realized, “Because that’s what’s in Tommy, isn’t it?”

Steve had a look of pure relief on his face that Billy understood context clues, “Yeah. I think so. Fuckin’ crazy, the thing is huge and it has, like, slimy dog demon things with plant faces that have a fuckton of teeth.”

Then Steve took a breath and said, “Alright. Talk later. I’ve got some calls to make.”

And that’s how Billy ended up spending ten minutes watching Harrington get grilled by Mrs. Byers, who was asking incredibly precise questions if his responses were any indication, and then Hopper who was definitely at the station and whose tinny voice Billy could hear telling them to  _stay put_ and keep an eye on Byers until he got there.

Steve handled people well, that’s what Billy noticed. He knew how to be in a conversation, comfortable enough not to try to control it so that it would be over sooner, and his whole body relaxed as he spoke to Joyce and the chief. He trusted them. He spoke to them like they were going to help.

Billy didn’t know if he really believed that. He didn’t trust that a policeman and a store clerk were everything Harrington believed they were and decided he would stick close by and watch until they proved useful or not. Thing was, you couldn't tell until you were watching someone in the moment if they were going to come through or not. There was a long line of adults who had let him down and he’d be damned if they got him or Steve killed.

But for now, he was going to observe.

It took all of seven minutes for the chief to show up. Mrs. Wheeler was surprised to see him, but he explained that Joyce was an old friend who’d called since the station was closer than her house or the hospital and she'd asked him to head over as a favor. It didn't hurt that during deployment he'd become more than passingly familiar with basic first responder procedures.

Mrs. Wheeler seemed to accept that--not that she was ever going to turn away a policeman at the door--and Hopper was soon parked next to Will checking his pulse, examining his pupils, and propping several couch cushions beneath his neck and shoulders so that if he vomited he wouldn’t choke. 

“Karen,” the chief said, addressing her by her first name like she’d insisted, “Would you mind staying with Will for a minute? I want to ask the boys a few questions about what happened.”

Mrs. Wheeler agreed, “Yes, of course,” with a pointed glance to Billy and Steve. She had more of her own questions, but she was gracious enough to offer him use of her kitchen to speak with them. In return, Hopper was nice enough not to mention the quite frankly pungent odor permeating the house.

Billy didn't think he was imagining that just in the half hour or so that they'd been there, it had gotten stronger. 

Once they were re-situated in the Wheeler's sunny kitchen, the stress lines on Hopper’s face highlighted by the morning sunlight, he took the interview from 0 to 60. And to Billy’s surprise, he wasn’t pretending like Billy was part of the background. He spoke to both of them. It was a weird feeling to have Hopper face him and Steve like they had things of value to say. 

“Is Will not acting himself?” he asked. He leaned back in the wooden dining room chair he sat in, arms crossed, bracing himself for any answer they could give him.

“Nah,” Steve told him, “Doesn’t seem like that’s the problem. He just looked out of it. I’m surprised he walked miles through the woods to get this close to town and passed out before he could say anything besides some mysterious shit to Hargrove."

“What’d he say to you, kid?” Hopper questioned him without hesitation. As far as he was concerned, Billy Hargrove was involved now. He wasn’t about to pretend he needed to sugarcoat anything.

Billy crossed his arms back. The leather jacket cocooned him from the worst of the cold outside, but he was experiencing his first Midwestern winter and he felt cold in his fucking bones. He couldn't say why, but he shot Steve a glance--as if to check in with him, as if they fucking did that sort of thing. But then his lips parted, feeling something soft and surprised and warm like the sun hitting his face spread through his entire body, because Steve was already looking at him. It was stunning and it was becoming--familiar, something he wanted to never live without again.

He just felt better with Harrington's eyes on him. Not fixed, not perfect, but braver in the sense that he wasn't ready to lash out. He felt calmer, more willing to engage with Hopper.  

“Tommy told me that it was supposed to be me," Billy admitted.

“Why didn’t you tell me Tommy told you that in the first place?” Hopper followed up fast.

“In the first place,” Steve echoed, baffled, which...right. The night had been a blur and he remembered suddenly that Steve hadn't been with him at the party, on the edge of the woods, and at the station with the chief staring at him with the most baffling combination of annoyed exhaustion and involuntary sympathy. 

Billy flicked his eyes over at Steve, taking pleasure in seeing him seated at a table holding a cup of coffee Mrs. Wheeler said was in the coffee pot if anyone wanted some. He wore a ridiculous yellow-and-red striped sweater beneath a puffy, green bomber jacket and he had no idea how someone could be so relaxed wearing all those colors at once. He was there for that, when Steve chose his clothes and put them on. Billy could remember him undressing and dressing and felt the memory of Steve stuffing his arms into his long sleeves settle inside him, heady and golden as honey on the comb.

“After Tommy, I went to the station to answer some questions about what happened at Theresa's,” he told Steve. He wanted to tell Steve things himself and keep everything he could between them without any outside interference. Even with Hopper here, Billy knew who he was really talking to. He looked at the chief again, "And I thought it was too strange to say. I thought you'd think I was on drugs or something."

Hopper commented, “You never went home last night.”

Billy wished he had some fucking gum to snap as he replied and flicked his eyes back over to the chief, drawling, “About that. I thought you were chief in this town, but after our pep talk I go to the gas station for some pretzels and find Tommy with his mouth ripped off and a bunch of rats ready to kill us.”

“Us?” Hopper asked sharply.

Steve intervened, raising his eyebrows at Billy to try to make him check his tone, saying, “That’s where we met up. I woke up with a craving for candy. Headed over to Charlie’s Pump and Go. This is good news, though, that you didn’t know before. We were worried about the cashier. We peeled out before the rats could get us, but I have no idea what happened to him.”

And it wasn’t relevant, but Billy felt excited to know the place’s fucking name. Finally.

Hopper was notably less excited.

“Okay, he  _what_ ,” he snapped and then the chief made this annoyed face where he blinked a lot and looked generally irritated and exhausted, “Start over, you two.”

Billy let Steve take the lead on the recap of their night, more interested in how Hopper reacted. Steve didn’t trip over his words, but he seemed overwhelmed by his own retelling, as if he hadn’t processed it all yet and watching him swallow hard set Billy’s teeth on edge. Shadows gathered in Steve’s dark eyes, growing more bruised by the second, disturbed his Tommy’s possession. 

“And he was just,” Steve paused as he blinked down at his coffee, voice straining, “He was so messed up. His face was like a Halloween mask and...a lot of skin was torn off. The rats followed us somehow--they just, like, poured out of Billy’s car after Will showed up. We ran here on foot. I don’t know if they’re still out there.”

He looked momentarily haunted and then Steve did something subtle with his face and the expression vanished. Steve had just raised the coffee cup to his mouth for a first sip when someone’s frenzied pounding impacted from the front of the house. Joyce had arrived.

“Hopper,” she yelled from outside, totally bypassing any sort of normal or polite greeting for the actual owner of the house, “Hopper, let me in!”

And Hopper was already standing up, throwing a “we’re putting a pin in this” expression at the boys and making his way to the front door where Karen Wheeler had yet to appear, still in the living room beside Will. 

“Mrs. Wheeler, I got the door,” called out Hopper, “I got the door.”

And when he opened it there was the usual barrage of questions he expected from Joyce and he found himself already sketching out the situation because they were, in this specific fight, fellow soldiers.

“Steve Harrington and another boy said Will ran out into the middle of the street while they were driving to town. They were close to the Wheelers and brought him over here.”

Joyce stood panting, trying to catch her breath, and then with all the nervous energy a bird-boned woman could contain, marched into the living room where Will was laid out like Snow White.

Karen turned, her mouth a flat line of sympathy, and said, "Oh, Joyce, I'm so sorry."

Joyce shot her a small and vacant smile, but said nothing. She glimpsed Will on the couch behind Karen and bit her lip until it turned white. Her eyes teared up and anger burned through her. 

“Hopper, explain,” she demanded, falling to her knees by her son, ready to punch and claw her way through monsters she couldn't see. That weren't visible, but they'd left a mark on Will that would never go away and she'd been grieving that since she'd gotten him back but seeing his prostrate body reminded her of how much he'd gone through. How much he would always be going through. 

“You’re asking me to explain?” the chief replied defensively. The last 24 hours had been an unmitigated shit show and two teenaged boys had yet more to tell him about last night. He was at his wit’s end. 

There were so many things to keep track of and he didn’t have enough eyes or arms or, hell, fucking  _anything_  that he needed in order to achieve the omniscience which would allow him to stay on top of the as yet unclear situation. Everything he needed was contained in the two hormonal dumpster fires he'd been questioning in the kitchen.

“Yes,” Joyce said, shaking her shaggy hair as she frowned at him and stroked Will’s cheek, “Yes, I need to know how to help him.”

“I’m still figuring it out. I’m still figuring everything out, Joyce, and you need to wait a second while I do and then I’ll come over here and report back like you’re my fucking superior officer.”

Joyce rolled her eyes, completely unphased, “God, spare me the sarcasm.”

And then a new voice came. 

“Really, Harrington?” drawled a young, smooth voice, “These are supposed to be our heroes? You fuckin’ idiot. They’re like chickens without their heads. They don’t have a clue.”

Some high school boy who looked about Jonathan's age leaned against the entrance to the living room, talking to sweet Steve Harrington who stood behind him in the hallway. 

“Man, shut up,” Steve grumbled to him, “They’re not making a great impression, but give this a chance," and then he saw her and gave a ridiculous, jerky wave, "Hey, Joyce."

Hopper rounded on the boys with a grim look in his eyes, still riding high off Joyce’s accusatory questions and now having to field doubts from some fucked up kid who’d be lucky to make it through high school with a diploma. 

“Don’t talk about shit you don’t understand, kid,” the chief growled at Billy, good and pissed even though it was a Saturday goddamn morning. He was going to have to enlist a masseuse for hypertension at this rate. His shoulders were stiffer than rock and he knew he’d have to find someone to chisel them loose again. But not until this was all over and the timeline on resolution wasn't looking promising.

He glared at Billy Hargrove, unimpressed. Steve Harrington stood behind him, tired but ready to move. The kid seemed different than the last time they'd met. The chief could honestly say he’d never seen the kid around someone who wasn’t part of his daughter’s D&D group--around someone his own age. Steve looked--less on edge, with someone around as big as Billy around. Someone on equal footing.

Before, when they were making frantic plans to storm the labs and eradicate the tunnels, he’d watched as Steve gripped his bat and breathed deliberately slow and how he’d watched all the kids with a quick and anxious gaze, looking at all of them quickly like he was counting his ducklings. Surrounded by people but all alone.

Seeing him next to Billy--mouthy and suspicious Billy, the little shit--was like seeing him in a whole new light. Steve was still looking at someone else, but this time it was with something Hopper wanted to call trust shining through his wall of indifference. Something in Hopper settled knowing he might have someone with whom to share the burden of this terrible reality. He knew Steve was alone in that big house--who didn't know about the Harringtons in this town? So yeah,  _glad_. He was glad they had each other.

Unfortunately, that didn't make Billy easy to deal with.

“Oh, I understand enough,” countered Billy, “I’m pretty sure this town’s full of little cracks where things like the monster in Tommy and little fucked up animals slip through. It’s not hard to figure out when you aren’t  _thirteen_. Those things want to take over. Probably gonna kill us all if they can.”

And Steve made an aborted movement, as if to step in front of Billy and take his place in the conversation and then the Hargrove kid did the strangest thing: he took a step forward, too, keeping himself between Harrington and the rest of the room. It was a subtle thing, something Hopper wouldn’t have thought him capable of and that he didn’t think Steve had picked up on.

He also wouldn’t have thought Billy capable of intelligent thought, not like this, and, shit, didn’t he feel like a jackass. Didn’t mean he wasn't still pissed.

“What makes you say that?” Hopper asked as evenly as he could.

Billy shrugged and maintained eye contact, hands clenching and unclenching into fists, “You're thinking it, too.”

“Hopper,” Joyce tried again, tired already, “What’s going on? Is my boy possessed again?”

And then there was a loud thump because Karen Wheeler had fainted. She was out cold on her ugly, paisley rug, hair flung over her face and positioned loose and disheveled as a rag doll.

“Shoulda seen that coming,” Hopper commented, already hefting up her prone body and settling her on the end of the couch not occupied by the Byers boy.

“This is a damn mess,” laughed Billy and then inclined his head back to Steve, “You know, I think we could still head back to my car and just fuckin’ leave.”

Steve replied, “There’s no way I’m leaving.”

And they sat there like an insane, confused, seething, ridiculous Mexican standoff. Karen was out for the count, Will was, too, and that left Joyce and Hopper and Steve and Billy shooting each other long, worried glances. Aware of their own helplessness and none of them dealing with it well.

Steve addressed Joyce, “We, uh--he was awake when we found him. Well, he found us, but. You get it. We were telling Hopper that he didn’t seem off like he’s gone. Will just looked tired as hell. But me and Billy, we keep getting ambushed by Tommy Hader and a hoard of undead rats.”

And Joyce just stared at him with both brows raised until Steve filled her and Hopper in on their eventful night and morning. 

-

When Karen roused after fifteen minutes, even more explanations followed. Billy didn’t understand why there was so much talking involved in avoiding what was starting to sound like the apocalypse. He continued to believe that Hopper and Joyce were useless. He didn’t trust Steve with them and--he realized with a start--that the dream of a person he'd carried with him through the long, winter months was becoming a person who ate pop tarts and insisted on driving his car so Billy could rest and who filled him in on things as if Billy deserved to know what was going on, no questions asked about his worth. Billy had real, concrete memories of Harrington shucking off his shirt with a big, practiced hand dragging the back of his collar over his head. He knew what his room smelled like. He knew Steve, despite saying nothing at all about it, hated the house he lived in and lived in it like he was a guest. 

They were like gossamer secrets, felt as though Harrington had whispered them into the nape of his neck for safekeeping, and Billy hoarded them away deep in his mind for later when he could turn them over and over. Go over the details he'd missed. Cling to them in the quiet space of his car (if he ever got that back, damn it) or his room. 

Now wasn't the time.

Billy stood near the front of the room, not having fully entered even though Steve had and was talking softly to Karen, and watched as Hopper and Joyce mulled things over. The smell in the house had worsened into something rotten and sickly. It smelled like the wing of a hospital where they put the terminal patients, but it had crept up so slowly he didn’t realize it until he found himself trying to cover his nose with the collar of Steve’s t-shirt. Everyone seemed to be having trouble with breathing it, though no one wanted to mention it.

Steve had been watching, too, the way Hopper and Joyce gravitated together to discuss things like "adults." Another surprise was that Billy had been under the impression that Steve knew the two of them better than he did. But he'd returned to stand with Billy after he and Karen finished talking instead of inserting himself into their discussion. He wasn't intervening. He wasn't moving closer to them. He trusted them, sure, but he didn't really know them and Billy fully intended to get the full story of Steve's involvement in this whole...Upside Down mess sooner rather than later. 

Steve told him suddenly, “I’m gonna go get my coffee,” and started off down the hallway. 

He turned and followed, thinking they might have themselves a little discussion, too. He was glad his father didn’t expect him back home until Sunday afternoon when his weekend chores were given to him. As long he completed them before bed, he usually escaped anything too horrible to end the week with. He still had time to deal with monsters and Steve and children with empty eyes croaking threats before he had to head back to Neil's house.

It felt so stupid to be worrying about Neil Hargrove with the things he’d just seen, that had stalked and harassed him, and tried to trap him and Steve. But he was. He did. This felt largely like an odd dream, a funny time-out from his regular routines, and maybe a part of him didn’t know for sure if this was real. If it was going to disrupt anything outside this surreal weekend. It felt like tomorrow everything would go back to normal. They just had to beat some Lovecraftian nightmare of an interdimensional prick and go back to their lives. 

But another part of him, the part that always told Billy the truth about how bad the bruises hurt or what he  _really_  felt about scaring Maxine or what he would do to his father if he  _ever_  touched Susan, that part of him whispered that this weekend was going to change everything. That this was a defining moment of his life and that people didn't just get off with a slap on the wrist and creepy chats with a force of evil like the Mind Flayer. It wasn't playing with them. It had no intention of letting anyone escape unscathed.

It was a lot to take in.

He shook his head to clear it and left the living room to follow Steve into the kitchen. As he walked, he noticed the walls seemed a darker shade of violet than they'd been when they'd entered, a deeper color than the paint had appeared when Karen let them in. And there was something odd about the windows, which suddenly weren't letting in enough light for a bright, cold Saturday morning. He swore he heard a squelch when he took a step onto a loose floorboard, as though it were damp underneath. It was eerie. He wondered if his head wasn't a little messed up from the last day's events. 

The hallway had to be fine. It was probably all in his head. That's what he wanted to believe.

He got to the kitchen just as Steve lifted the undoubtedly lukewarm coffee to his mouth. Billy could have sworn he was watching it in slow motion. Steve took a sip and immediately choked, spitting out something that was black as coffee except thicker onto the kitchen table where they’d been questioned (for Billy, the fucking second time) by Jim Hopper. It was gross and it was involuntary like whatever Steve drank had been rejected by his body before his mind could process the liquid on his tongue.

Steve rushed over to a roll of paper towels and was wiping his tongue with a couple wadded paper towels before Billy could blink, gagging and hacking. He was panicking, too, mindless in his ministrations.  

Billy had a bad feeling and leaned over the table. The shit Steve spit out had the consistency of oatmeal, except it was black as tar, and when he got even closer he realized something shiny was in it. The thin slash of a tiny rib from a small mammal--a gleaming, grinning white--was visible in the goo. Billy had a few guesses from where that was from. He sucked in a breath and felt the first stirrings of terror in his gut.

He was across the room in a flash shoving Steve towards the kitchen sink, and he turned the faucet onto cold and shoved Harrington’s face sideways under the stream of water where it hit the side of his face at full blast.

“Wash it out,” Billy hissed, trying not to admit how fucking scared it made him to think of what Steve had sipped, “ _Wash it out, Steve_.”

Steve had been flailing when Billy first grabbed him, but within seconds he was righting himself so that faucet water was rinsing out his mouth. Half his bangs were a sopping mess and the indent of his eye was a small well of water drowning his eyelashes, but he was spitting out less and less gunk.

Billy wordlessly handed Steve some more paper towels and he wiped his face in rough swipes, his cheeks drained of blood. He was shaken. They both were. His hands hung by his sides and he wanted, badly enough for it to hurt, to hold Steve’s face and breathe in the air he breathed out. He wanted to press his forehead to Steve’s and know they were okay. Together. Alive.

But he didn’t press in, didn’t move at all.

“She said it was coffee,” Steve said blankly.

Something clicked, then, like all his thoughts found a place to land. 

A light went on in Billy’s head and he became very aware of his body standing in the Wheeler's kitchen, of the scent of filth in the air. He walked over to the fridge and swung open the door. The Wheelers were a family that did well and ate well. They were a stocked-fridge kind of family, with shelves someone knew would be full of home cooked meals and juice and fresh milk and all sorts of packaged snacks, so many that some were completely unopened. 

Except even the unopened food had rotted green and blue in their plastic containers. Grapes oozed white fluid from shrunken spheres. There was steak on a dinner plate covered in Saran Wrap, but it was white and fuzzy in spots and as he leaned in closer, covering his nose with his leather-covered wrist clamped over his lips and nose, he noticed the minute writhing of swollen-bodied maggots. Hot dogs and cheese slices were completely ruined. A cold wave of molded groceries wafted from inside the fridge and the unfiltered stench pushed him back a step. He slammed the door shut and stepped back again, his back bumping up against Steve's chest unexpectedly. He must have approached the fridge after Billy opened the door.

Stunned at the smell and the feeling of being dirty all over, neither moved away from the contact. 

“Fuck,” Steve breathed behind him. Soft. Young. Scared. The sound of his voice had Billy clenching his teeth because it hurt and he could hear it in his chest with them pressed together and he promised to himself fiercely that whatever happened, nothing would touch Steve. He wouldn’t allow it.

“Why is everything rotten?!” asked Steve, though he obviously had an inkling. He had some idea formulating now. They both did. “Why is everything rotten?! We need to get out of here, something’s fucking wrong. Hopper! Joyce!”

Steve was making his way to the door and so was Billy, Steve's fingers clenched in Billy's borrowed shirt to propel him along.

It was when they were making their way back to the living room that they heard a loud thump come from the basement. It reverberated, echoing from the bottom of the house in a massive impact. The house shook and groaned and he wanted that to be a figure of speech, but the walls seemed to be coming alive, changing texture, releasing noises of...suffering. They hurried down the hallway and it was like being encased in decaying throat laboring to breathe. 

A scream sounded and it was Karen’s. Billy almost felt sorry for her, thinking it might have been better if she’d just woken up to an empty house, her unexpected visitors gone and only her confusion to keep her company. He knew it was wishful thinking, at this point, to think they weren't brought here. Cornered here. That this wasn't the intention all along and he beating himself up over the fact that they'd seen the rats and not Tommy and he hadn't questioned  _why_  that was. 

Billy thought, bitterly, that the Wheelers didn't have a fucking raccoon problem. Not even close.

The house shook harder. Pictures came off the walls and broke on the floor. A mirror near the front door toppled with a wail of shatter onto the warm red rug in the foyer. There was an especially loud slam and it was only when the second one hit that Billy realized it was footsteps.

Coming up the basement stairs.

They’d almost made it to the living room and could see inside where Hopper had shoved Karen and Joyce behind him and they were sandwiched between the chief and Will still unconscious on the couch. Hopper pulled his gun and gestured for them to get behind him, but Billy pushed Steve in the room and then ran the few steps to the front door, flung it open, and grabbed their weapons from behind the rose bushes, the soft skin on the backs of his hands collecting scratches from his carelessness of their thorns.

He ran back in as the last few steps landed, had handed over Steve’s bat and gripped his hammer with two tight grips. He wished he had his fingerless gloves to better his grip, but he would make do. They stood next to Hopper and Billy felt numb inside.

He promised himself he wouldn’t hesitate if Tommy came at Steve.

And, yeah, he knew who it was before the basement door slammed wide open and the stink of dirt and blood and shit and dead skin spread across the first floor like a burst of sewage from a broken pipe. They heard a shuffle of leaves or vines crawling over the walls. Coming closer.

Tommy said, “ _Heeeeeere’s Tommy_ ,” as he lunged into the room and he laughed wetly like he was cackling around a mouthful of blood. 

His steps were accompanied by the sentient slithering of huge, gnarled roots which curled around his legs like pets as they entered the room. The walls around them sunk in, became grayer, began to groan deep and inhuman groans. Steve’s body pressed into his, shoulder to shoulder, and he almost jumped and Steve was shaking but he stood there staring at Tommy with a hard look in his eyes and his jaw set.

Tommy had changed once again since they’d last encountered him. The skin around his eyes had peeled away like old paint, leaving the pink and red of raw muscle on display. Liquid the color of Steve’s not-coffee dripped from his fingertips and assembled into rats which played at his feet, still in the sneakers the real Tommy had worn to the party. 

Without a mouth, with his eyebrows torn away, with the black veins pressing out of his skin like they would burst at a touch--Billy knew Tommy Hader wasn’t coming back from that. His body wasn’t dying anymore. 

It was already dead.

Steve made a pained, animal sound like a dog that had been kicked hard in the belly. Billy only knew Tommy as some dick from school who thought he was the shit. He was a hanger-on, a bad friend with a mean streak a mile wide, but Steve--who Tommy always shit on because he was bitter about losing him, he must have known a different Tommy who cared and laughed and had feelings. Once upon a time.

“Look at all these tasty morsels,” the thing in Tommy teased as it raised a hand and casually peeled off a nail from Tommy’s grey hand like he was picking off lint from a sweater. Karen or Joyce or both began to cry behind them. So did Steve.

“Stop it,” Steve bit out, resentment corrosive on his tongue, “Don’t  _do that_ to him.”

Tommy cocked his head like a cat and fixed his gaze on Steve. Billy bristled.

“Poor thing, you think he can be saved.”

A few tears fell down Steve’s cheeks and he demanded, “Give him back, you sick fuck, give him back right now!”

Billy was frozen and he couldn’t tell whether it was from anger at the monster or absolutely consuming fury with Steve who was painting a target on his face. Who couldn’t be asking to die more than he was currently.

And then Steve took a step forward and Tommy proved Billy wrong. With Steve’s single step, Tommy appeared in a flash in front of Steve, that scary speed on display again, and he grabbed Steve’s hand and he bit off Steve’s index finger in one easy crunch of teeth. There was a moment of silence, like a balloon filling with helium, a quiet airing up, that ended with a pop. A pop--and Steve's finger was gone and blood was already pouring down to his elbow like spilled juice and it felt like the whole room broke.

Like before, there had been a chance, however minuscule, to return to normalcy. But then there was after.

After that it was all a blur: Steve screaming and sobbing like the last time Neil ever beat his mother and he went after her with a piece of broken glass, Hopper yelling incoherently and his gun went off but nothing seemed to happen and Joyce was shoving past the chief to grab the back of Steve’s jacket and pull him into her where he crumpled and sobbed with his face against her neck, and the whole time there was the grinding crunch of Steve’s finger on those rows and rows of teeth. 

Billy was seeing in red, his vision flooding with scarlet and auburn and cardinal and maroon and wine and rose. He could have been a painter with such nuance to one color, given himself over the brush and canvas if this intensity of emotion never went away. And Billy. Billy--

He had planned for a lot of things with last night bright in his rear view. The monster descending from the sky, the rats flooding the streets and the whole time it was him and Steve against the world fighting with each other and for each other and it had been a dream, yes, like how he always dreamed of beautiful things just out of reach but he could admit that this single dream had begun to veer more and more towards reality. It felt for one shining moment that he had someone to take care of--not someone his dad made him take care of like Susan or Max--but someone to take care of because  _they_  took care of  _him_. 

He was unprepared for the shooting pain that ran through him when he saw how Steve had more loyalty to that already-dead prick than was healthy or reasonable. How Steve’s heart was apparently massive and only managed to  _look_  normal-sized. And he couldn’t pinpoint what hurt about that so much but Billy was screaming bloody murder and he knew he was fucking outclassed--Billy always knew when something could beat him into an early grave and it usually looked just like Neil but now it resembled something terrifying wearing the scraps of Tommy’s body and eating the finger of the boy he--

Billy was just screaming at some point and the rats ran around his feet and he started pounding away at them with the heavy hammer in his hands. He heard Tommy laughing again, which he was calling laughter but sounded like someone was ripping the air apart.

Tommy whooped with delight, yelling, "Such fragile things, humans. Such easy toys to break!"

Billy didn't know quite what happened but he found himself lurching towards Tommy with the sledge hammer and he saw the way Tommy faced him with his skin practically hanging on by threads and the fucking monster was grinning but its eyes were wide--like it wouldn't ever have expected a human to rush it the way Billy was and like it was paralyzed as if it couldn't move at all.

It was a stupid decision, but he wasn't thinking. Steve's scream-crying was about the only thing penetrating into his brain, the only thing he could compute, and if he died then. Fuck. He died for something that mattered.

Billy's hammer hit Tommy right in the forehead and there was a sound like a breaking levee and he was shocked, so shocked to have made contact and to still be alive. Black liquid rained over his face and he could taste its rancid taste in his mouth. His jacket was drenched and he thought he could hear the monster shrieking in pain even without Tommy's ruined mouth--its cries of agony emanated from the sickly, living walls and the slimy roots and the rats as if they were all puppets to a single host.

He was flabbergasted, aghast that he'd crushed the thing draped in the remnants of Tommy's face, which lay on the floor and Tommy's body was deflated like something large and horrible had slithered out of it. He looked behind him, not understanding why Tommy hadn't utterly destroyed him and there he was: Will Byers, fully awake, with his hands thrown out straight in front of him and a line of blood running from his nose. 


	7. i asked for much; i received much

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Billy copes, Steve remembers, and pop tarts just aren't gonna cut it anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An intermission chapter where everyone takes a deep, closed-eyed inhale. Also--Billy thinks about himself in the terms Neil applies to him at some point. Just a warning.

Steve wasn’t given the blessed reprieve of unconsciousness, but time lost all meaning to him for unknown moments. He felt like he was inside a VHS tape that was going in fast forward where people moved and jerked around a room but no words could be heard and no conversation followed. He was vaguely aware of his body, but even staring down at the gruesome absence at the base of his palm wasn’t quite registering. 

It had been there, and then it wasn’t, and then he was on the ground with his face tucked into a neck that smelled faintly of gardenias and then Tommy’s body was just a skin suit on the ground and Steve couldn’t move. He just couldn’t move at all.

His body was paralyzed, but his mind flew in all sorts of directions, snagging on memories like thread on a nail.

Tommy was dead. He’d been dead--thankfully, mercifully dead--by the time whatever was wearing his skin stepped out of the basement. But when Steve was faced with his living death, he couldn’t keep himself from trying to help, to bring him back and banish his possessor. Like if he demanded Tommy be returned healthy and hale he’d materialize through sheer force of will.

But Tommy was dead and Steve’s brain felt melted and lumpy and burning and he couldn’t stop remembering their childhood.

All he could think about were the cheerful, sunny days he’d spent as a kid running through trees and high grass with Tommy behind his house, his parents’ pool luxurious but holding no interest for two scrappy little boys craving the sort of exhaustion only skinned knees and sweaty sunburns could bestow. 

They’d gone on practically thousands of lizard hunting expeditions, learning to grab them from the trunks of trees quick and careful. Lizards were fast but they were fragile, and sometimes if you grabbed one too hard you’d pull their tail clean off and it would flip-flop in your palm as the lizard scampered off into the leaves. Steve never liked it when that happened, though Tommy thought it was pretty funny, and he remembered his mom telling him that their tails always grew back and not to worry too much about it.

He saw the images in his mind: Tommy with shaggy brown hair and high water jeans because he’d hit a growth spurt, the sun blazing and sharp on their reddening cheeks, and a flopping-fish green tail in his hand, practically alive but not alive and impossible to reattach.

Steve felt like one of those lizards except for how he knew he wasn’t going to miraculously grow back an appendage. He'd been caught too hard and now something was irretrievably gone. Blood flowed steadily from his wound and he stared blankly at it.

He remembered Joyce holding him as he cried--and raised his good hand to his face to pat a cheek, noticing that he still was, sluggishly and without thought--and then she’d released him to check on her son.

He wanted desperately to put together the pieces of what had happened, but the second the Mind Flayer--and he _hated_ that name--it sounded so fucking ridiculous and childish in the face of all it had done, all it could do. The Flayer had snapped its frightening mouth over him and irreparably damaged him. Changed his shape. Marked his body and wasn’t it funny that his first brush with the other world had left him unscathed and able to live a lie where he could pretend nothing had happened and now.

Now there was no hiding. He merely had to look down to see proof of the horror which had eclipsed his life.

Two hands pressed on his shoulders, and he jumped and felt disoriented when his eyes flew up to see Billy Hargrove’s thick-fringed lashes and ocean eyes trying to drag him back from his consuming thoughts. He wanted to sink into them and exist only within a soft, floating place where he didn’t have to think anymore. Where his feelings wouldn’t survive. 

Billy’s mouth trembled a little as he stared at him, like he was seeing Steve but something made him hard to look at. He kept looking and tightened his mouth into a flat line as he grasped Steve in a firmer hold and said...something.

Steve saw his mouth moving, but didn’t understand. He realized he couldn’t hear anything, that there was no noise besides a strong wind rushing in his ears. He shook his head, feeling nauseated beyond belief. The smell in the house was unspeakably foul. He wanted to leave. He wanted so badly to be somewhere else.

He didn’t want to go home, but he wanted to be somewhere safe and secluded. He felt too visible.

He felt too seen by abyssal, many-toothed monsters, like he was an easily found point on a map and was seconds away from rediscovery and he couldn’t hear shit, wouldn’t hear the monster’s thundering footsteps if they did come again.

He felt his breath come quicker and tried to keep contact with Billy.

The longer he stared at Billy’s face the more he realized that outside of the other boy’s eyes, his whole face was wet and black and dripping with a liquid that had obviously rained down upon him. Billy was covered in black fluid from his face to his forearms, messy as paint splatter. Steve noticed the sledge hammer on the floor next to Billy’s feet covered in similar gore but with the addition of meat and thin strands of hair. 

Steve swallowed hard because he’d heard an impact and otherworldly screaming and he could see that Billy, who’d asked for none of this but managed to keep pulling him out of piles of shit like it was his job, must have been the one to stop the Flayer. 

As its mouth closed on him and he’d stared into eyes that were no longer familiar, no longer full of history, he’d seen up close that Tommy’s skin was coming off in strips and clumps, that his left ear was drooping down to the hinge of his jaw right before he’d bitten down.

“Harrington,” Billy said and suddenly Steve could hear him which filled him with pure relief because he’d able able to hear the monster if it came back and Billy's voice sounded familiar and safe. Billy wasn't someone you could just ignore, from his eyes to fists to the words he spoke.

The problem was he was utterly assailed by the chaos of the whole room in the form of Joyce murmuring wildly to Will and Karen hyperventilating and Hopper’s footsteps along the hallway and it was too much to bear. Steve could feel the gaping holes of terror riddling his body, widening into mouths themselves. Could Billy see them?

It was clear that Billy had been repeating and repeating his name and it came again in his rough voice, “Harrington, answer. Fucking _answer_ me. Please.”

Steve took his good hand and reached up to cup Billy’s cheek. It was wet, slick to the touch. He felt like he’d skimmed his hand over the surface of a dark sea except that beneath it was Billy--Billy, who never seemed to look away from him no matter how many people were in the room. Billy who was the source of the impact and the end of the Flayer’s disgusting possession of someone who'd been his best friend for years and years. 

The need to touch him was strong. He was the promise of something Steve had never had but usually couldn’t bring himself to reach for from anyone. He was half out of his mind, that thing’s dead and diseased eyes phantom and banished and drilling _into_ him, but he thought Billy might be more golden than the darkness could swallow. More searing, burning light than it could stand.

Billy breathed and Steve, eyes blurring again, breathed with him.

His jaw was cut sharp, but his eyes looked--not angry. Not taunting. They seemed...something else. Steve couldn’t place it, his thoughts shifting like sand in a desert storm, but he wouldn’t mind seeing it more. If Billy looked at him like that again sometime, like he was searching for something he could calm within Steve. As if he saw that Steve was sitting on a ruined living room floor, alone, a relic to a grief he couldn’t wholly comprehend yet and wasn't asking him to do anything besides continue living in whatever form that took. 

Steve couldn’t look away from the boy who was all thorns, who spoke like he was dodging bullets or shooting them, who’d pulled him into his car at a gas station and pulled him and Will away from it this morning and he wasn’t gone. Hadn’t left. 

Billy Hargrove, with all his meanness and too-intense attention, was so very much himself in this moment that he became, just by existing, an anchor that kept Steve from slipping under the onslaught of fear that kept gripping his ankle and trying to pull him into the deep. 

Steve--well, Steve didn’t know quite what to do with that. He could barely feel the throb of his injury. That was confusing, too. It was a missing finger, but he couldn’t feel the sear of pain he’d always felt when something was supposed to hurt. 

He thought that maybe he could feel it, somewhere, and that his mind was shielding him from that hurt for as long as it could.

“You said please,” Steve murmured and his voice felt like it was coming out of a distant, separate body somewhere below him. Maybe it was; maybe the monster had pulled him out of his body, too, had removed mind from flesh and left him there to flounder.

Billy’s jaw worked, but he said casually, “Yeah, dickweed, I have manners. You wanna get up? I’ve got you,” and he worked a filthy, impossibly sure hand around Steve’s back and hefted him up from where he was kneeling on the Wheelers’ living room floor.

Steve felt a few tears slide down his face and blood dripping off the tip of his elbow and he felt like he was coming in and out of focus, like a camera lens someone kept trying to adjust. Billy pulled him up, still facing him, and Steve deliriously swiped a thumb right beneath one of his startlingly bright eyes, a shock of blue in the black shit all over his face.

He stayed still for the touch, like a lion allowing itself to be pet but also maddeningly human and present. Steve couldn’t look away.

“Your eyes are so blue,” he told Billy, who flinched as if he’d been slapped, “You think they’ll give me a discount at the movies now?” 

And they both looked down at his hand at the same time. Steve gagged, a gravelly, chunky sound in his chest and throat. 

Billy shook his head, “Yeah, Stevie, I think they will. Hopper’s gonna take us back to my car. He’s got a deputy waiting for us there who checked it out and said it was rat-free, lucky fuckin’ us, right?”

“Uh,” Steve stuttered, totally out of it, “I don’t--?”

A hand slid around his side and it felt like Billy’s hand cupped the entirety of his rib cage, keeping all the bones from rattling free. He was ushered into Billy’s side, shoulder to chest, and that hand propelled him forward.

Steve was beginning to become alarmed, clawing to return to a clearer state of mind. He tried to concentrate, but couldn't. Nothing would solidify. Everything was loopy, especially his thoughts. He thought Billy felt like a boat who was sailing him easily across choppy waters and what the _fuck_. He _wanted_ to think clearly, but he couldn’t. 

“I’m taking you to the hospital,” Billy told him. He was talking to Steve like he was a bird with a broken wing. He sounded soothing, like he was worried. And Steve wanted to be worried over, he thought. He wanted to be worried over by Billy. _I’ve got you_ , Billy said a few moments ago and he wanted it to be the truest thing he knew.

They were outside within seconds and got into the back of Hopper’s Jeep, Jim getting in a few minutes later after Steve watched him walk Joyce and Will to her car. He'd spoken with Joyce and then shut her car door for her and headed over to his own.

Steve was surprised when Karen Wheeler got into the passenger seat. He’d nearly forgotten where he was, in whose house his whole self had been snapped in two, but she was getting in and turning to him. She reached out to him but didn’t touch, like she was scared of how he’d react.

“Steve, honey,” she said, “Are you okay?”

Steve fully re-entered his body at her question. Being around other people, people who weren’t Billy Hargrove apparently, brought back his need to placate, to pretend it was fine. 

He didn’t know how, but being vulnerable around strangers made it easier to respond. He couldn’t let go with them, couldn’t let them know how far gone he really was. It was a self-protective habit he’d never been more thankful for. 

“Been better,” he grunted, because his hand was beginning to throb white-hot.

He'd realized he was leaning into Billy who’d helped him into the backseat and withdrawn to a respectful few inches away except for his bad hand, which he held in both of his. Embarrassed of his desire for closeness, he leaned away, straightened into something coping and lonely and shoving all the fear and terror and shaking as far away as he could. 

Hopper merely glanced at him through the rear view mirror and said, “Good to hear you talking, son. We were worried.”

The pain was getting worse and Steve’s mouth was drying out. It hurt; it just plain fucking _hurt_. The bleeding had slowed and Steve realized it was because Billy was silently holding a kitchen towel firmly to his hand where it lay between them. Steve stared at Billy’s hands on him and glanced up at his face, making eye contact and holding, and he tried hard to smile but couldn’t manage it.

“Is Will okay?” he asked.

“He’s going to be fine. There’s some doctors he’s going to need to see,” Hopper responded and continued, “And for the record, we were never at the Wheeler's, their house is terribly infested with raccoons, and the exterminators asked Karen to leave immediately and get a hotel room for her and her family. That’s the story and we’re sticking to it.”

Karen seemed tense when she commented, “I’d feel more comfortable going to the state police and alerting the media of the danger in our town. There are people here, Hopper, with families who need to know about this.”

Steve got the impression, even through a layer of thoroughly distracting physical pain and the balm of contact through Billy’s closeness, that they were starting an argument they’d already had a couple times.

Hopper said, “There’s no proof of anything. No one--and I mean absolutely _no one_ \--is going to believe us. They’re definitely not going to believe you alone. That thing is gone and all you have to show for it is a gross, messy house. No one’s going to think a monster did that. You have to realize that.”

“And dead children,” Karen countered evenly, “The fact that this could result in murdered children doesn’t bother you at all?”

Hopper was frustrated and he sounded like it when he said, “I get where you’re coming from, but people are gonna think you’re a _basket case_. That wouldn’t help anyone.”

Karen rolled her eyes in a way that looked so much like Nancy that Steve’s lips twitched as she said, “So I’m supposed to--what? Wait until the secret government agents you called show up and fix my house and pretend nothing happened?”

“Yes,” Hopper said instantly, “You’re supposed to do exactly that. These are problems coming out of a government lab and they won’t just be shadowy faces. You will be talking to them and signing a nondisclosure agreement not to say anything and you are going to keep your head down for your family’s sake. That thing doesn’t want any of you. It was luring Steve and Billy and the Byers to your house for convenience.”

“How would it even know about us?” Karen demanded.

“It’s been around for a while,” Hopper said carefully, uninterested in giving Karen more ammo, “Collecting data. Making plans. The way to stop it isn’t something just anyone can do. It takes a special person.”

“A special person like Will?” asked Karen, voice quiet and chilly, “A sweet little boy like Will to hide behind? Because that’s what it looked like to me.”

But Hopper was done with this woman. Her questions of morality echoed his own, but he’d long since come to the conclusion that _it did_ take special people like Will and his El to stop dangerous beings like this and that life wasn’t fair. That causing mass panic that people were unlikely to believe anyway would result in imprisonment by the US government where no would ever hear from you again and you couldn’t do shit for anybody. 

“I don’t think you’re wrong,” Hopper admitted, “But I don’t think you’re right. You can speak with the agent I contacted, though, because those are questions over my head. I have to work with the resources I’m given. This isn’t much different and I don’t have the answers, Karen. Ask the red, white, and blue when they come knocking. Believe me, they will.”

Karen’s mood had obviously withered and she shot the chief a glare, “Don’t threaten me.”

Her hostility made Hopper appear strangely comfortable, like he dealt with pissed off people all the time and it was relaxing, and he said, “It’s not my threat. I’m preparing you for what I promise is going to be an incredibly upsetting conversation you’re _going_ to be having with our federal government.” 

Steve had zoned out by then and his hand hurt and Billy was still there, sitting next to him, uncharacteristically quiet until Steve realized he was seething.

Billy spoke up in a strained voice that spoke of frustration and restraint, “Harrington needs a doctor. At least turn the car on.”

Hopper nodded, apologetic, “Yeah, sorry, kid. We’re going,” and he shot Karen a look that said they were done talking until the boys were out of the car.

It took no time at all to get out of the neighborhood and next to Billy’s car where two deputies parked behind it in a squad car. They’d put his vehicle in neutral and pushed it onto the grassy shoulder. 

Steve felt Billy squeeze his wrist, obviously relieved to see it. 

Hopper walked them to the Camaro, giving it a thorough check over himself, and said, “Sorry I can’t come. I’ve got a lot to sort out with this mess, but I’ll stop by your house later tonight, Steve. I won’t forget,” he promised and he looked at Billy and said, “You did good, kid. We all owe you one.”

Steve vaguely registered that he responded with a general thanks, but he was drifting again. The scene replayed over in his head: a house that was not a house and a boy that was not a boy and skin that was wrapping paper shedding everywhere. The normalcy of Hopper and Karen’s argument hadn’t lasted and couldn’t last, not when he and Billy were alone at last and all the real things he felt began to leak out again.

Billy asked, “What, Harrington, I can’t hear you,” and Steve touched his mouth and felt his lips moving, like he was saying something. He didn’t know when he’d begun talking.

Steve opened his mouth and then he heard his words come out, “It’s the only thing I’ll see when I look down,” and he snapped his mouth shut and stopped anything else from leaving it. 

Steve wasn’t ready for this part, when the Flayer really hurt someone and it wasn’t an easy fix via a magical girl with a small, serious face stopping things with her mind. 

Billy didn’t answer him, merely said grimly, “Apply more pressure on it. Your grip is lax,” and the ride to the hospital commenced. Steve wanted to talk, he wanted to ask Billy questions and hear Billy’s answers, and he wanted to be normal and whole and unaware. He didn’t want to go home; he wanted to go back in time to a place where Tommy was alive and he could grip a ball in his dominant hand with all five fingers.

But it wasn’t going to get better. It couldn’t be undone.

-

Steve remembered so much and so little of the morning and the bite and the drive to the hospital. He felt like he was dressed in layers and layers of coats and shirts and woolen socks on the hottest day of the summer, overwhelmed like he was the day his parents called when he was thirteen and told him they’d be staying in London “a little longer, baby,” to just keep taking the bus to and from school and keep his nose clean. They’d come home three weeks later.

And they’d told him to behave, but he remembered taking money out of his piggy bank and buying weed off a precocious classmate with a dad who dealt in town out of his auto garage. Steve just didn’t want to feel bad anymore. He wanted the haze of marijuana before he’d known what being high felt like, watched his dealer roll a joint and taken meticulous notes.

When his parents got home, he’d only just shaken out the expensive marble cigar ashtray his father guarded jealously that he’d positively filled with his blunts’ ashes. It felt vindicating. It felt like getting one over on him. 

Six months before that, his mother had caught his father having an affair, which had been the main fixture of their daily screaming matches if they ran into each other in their huge house.

It was the only time he asked his mother anything about their volatile relationship, the night they returned from London after he’d tried pot for the first time. The night they came home, she tucked him into bed and brought with her a book by Virginia Woolf he couldn't really follow along with but loved listening to anyway; his mother’s voice like an arm around him, a touch she usually withheld, her absence soothed by her voice filling up the room and laying claim to the space like she’d never left. 

She was reading _Mrs. Dalloway_ that night, the lamplight casting her in tones of amber and honey, washing her eyes in a way that felt like she was closer to him than she truly was in her heart. In her smooth voice, with her perfume and body heat obliterating the aloneness in him, she read.

“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged,” Viola Harrington intoned, musical and lilting, “She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”

She had paused there, something she hardly did when reading to him, and he had enough time to imprint the last words of the paragraph to memory--so much more his mother’s words than Woolf’s. She had said them and, he saw, she’d meant them.

 _She had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day_ , she’d read and he’d never forgotten. The rest of the book was a shadow, a diaphanous slip of nothing, and the context was lost but he could hear the warning like it was her own.

It made him feel close to her. It made him stupid.

“Mom, why don’t you divorce dad?” he'd asked, tentative at the beginning but following the question to the very end. 

She’d breathed in and turned a look on him that made him want to flinch. Viola was furious, her brown curls lustrous and her collarbones lovely and covered in perfect tan skin, and he felt afraid of her. Of what she felt for him. That none of it was good.

“Do not,” she whispered cuttingly, leaning close to his face, “ever talk about me and your father. You’re a child and it’s not your place.”

She'd waited until he nodded in acquiescence and she’d left, gathering up the book and tying a loose knot in her silk evening robe. Viola left Steve’s room for the last time with a book. After that, she’d never read him anything. 

It was only when he got a few years older and Tommy got back at Carol for something extremely petty that it dawned on him that his mother held a mean grudge. That from then on she hadn’t taken a step into his bedroom with a novel and he’d never understood until suddenly he did.

She felt betrayed by him, though he was just a boy asking for clarity just as he was clumsily extending his own support, flimsy and childish thought it was. That was a tough memory, one he didn’t recall often, but something about the ride to the hospital was bringing it back.

It was her words that came back to him in the car with Billy, her advice or her warning: _she had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day_ , and it seemed as if she had, in her removed but sensitive fashion, anticipated all the terrible experiences he’d had in Hawkins with monsters that had proven difficult to kill.

On the car ride, he was aware of the late morning sky shining through the window. He heard Billy breathing next to him and he wanted, so badly, to touch something that cared for him even the slightest, smallest amount. To know that for now--but not much longer--there was someone beside him who’d thrown himself into the fight right next to him. 

He was tired and hurt and so awfully, gapingly empty and he leaned his head back into the seat rest, closed his eyes, and pushed his towel-wrapped hand wound-first into his leg to supply the pressure. He let his good hand--because he had one of those now--take timid hold of the sleeve of Billy’s leather jacket where he clutched the stick shift between them. 

It was sturdy leather, as unyielding as the boy wearing it, and neither mentioned what Steve had done. Steve could hardly admit it to himself except that he was asking for something and for once someone was just fucking _giving it_ to him. A crumb of comfort. No one ever just gave him something for nothing, but then Billy Hargrove had shown up to kick the shit out of him just to turn around have his back in the face of the Flayer. Twice.

He felt Billy’s grip on the shift stick lock up, turn to steel, like he wanted to crush it to dust in his grasp. Billy exhaled through his nose roughly. He wasn’t shaking Steve off, but maybe he didn’t want to be almost-touched. Maybe it wasn’t a comfort Steve got to savor and his body throbbed from a point starting from his missing finger but his chest hurt, too, all of a sudden.

His neck went hot with shame. He was mindless and needy and gross, which was how he became when he started getting attached--truly fucking attached--to someone and he was waiting for them to brush him off. Nancy, admittedly, had done a real number on him, but his twistedness predated her entrance into his life. 

He’d grown up as part of the background--no, worse, because being part of the background implied someone else was in the fucking room and that wasn’t really something his parents were into. Not when there were interesting, intelligent people with which to foster relationships, their only son tucked safe and sound in the echoing cavern of the stately mausoleum they called a home.

Steve was already re-thinking his honest appeal for contact. It’s why he was so good at convincing girls to keep their windows open for him to climb through at night or argue a gas station attendant into letting him purchase mass amounts of alcohol--he was always ready to give a sales pitch, to argue the point, but quiet sincerity made his fucking teeth itch. It never ended well. 

Maybe Billy had finally had enough after putting up with Steve’s shit. Maybe he should’ve pretended to sleep all the way to the hospital.

As Steve began to loosen his hold on Billy’s sleeve, overwhelmed mind running through all the other ways he would need to withdraw, the blond boy swallowed hard and snapped, “ _Don’t_.”

He froze, unsure how to proceed and what exactly Billy was talking about. He was strangely impenetrable in that he wouldn’t leave Steve, but he never knew quite where they stood. Just that they stood beside each other, staring into an abyss that was earnestly trying to kill them. 

Steve didn’t want to assume what Billy meant, but when he strengthened his grip on Billy’s sleeve again the other boy relaxed minutely. It felt like acceptance. He felt his palm begin to sweat, nervous and excited and fucking happy about the contact and the idea that maybe Billy wanted it, too.

Billy asked, “How’s your hand?”

Steve answered honestly, “Hurts like a bitch,” and the pain, as was the trend, came rushing back. 

His head was still tilted back and he felt tears drip from the corners of his eyes and over his sideburns and into his ears. He had to remind himself that he hadn’t lost a hand, hadn’t lost an arm, that the pain could have been so much worse. 

Oddly enough, that didn’t help stop the tears. They gushed like drops from a stopper, unphased by his forced optimism like they knew better than to believe it.

How surreal this would have been two weeks ago: crying next to Billy Hargrove in his agonizingly masculine Camaro, practically holding his hand. But that was the thing about people Steve loved the most: how wonderfully surprising they could be.

It was an epiphany he was only just experiencing; that Dustin and Mike and Lucas and Max could just accept the threat to their lives and carry on, though he was beginning to wonder how well they understood what they were up against. The Flayer, despite its looming and enormous shadow, had never truly hurt any of them.

It made him worry. He could see the-thing-in-Tommy in his mind's eye; and whose name wasn’t actually Mind Flayer, whose name had to be something as real and terrifying as its infected eyes and the rot and decay which spilled from it like polluted water from a broken dam. He got lost in the memory of Tommy’s melting face and spore-spotted cheeks and stayed there. 

For how long, he didn’t know.

Billy told him something else, so quiet he didn’t catch it, but by then Steve was gone again--drifting on waves of re-enactment, knowing that he would have to continue to live after this, go to school and see his parents again and carry on after the Wheeler’s house. He almost didn’t notice when Billy walked him into the emergency room, gave no answers and let Billy dig his insurance card out of his pocket like an invalid slumped against the nurse’s check-in counter.

He was out of it again, sweating followed by chills, Billy’s presence next to him a constant center of solidity, the eye of the storm. Through the waiting room, the startlingly fast time it took for some procedure to happen, what had to be a few hours of rest afterwards, and the drive home he drifted and if he hadn’t been so exhausted he would have wailed.

All that, the struggle to get away from evil and save Tommy and being violated and he ended up back at his parent’s house, a lonely rich kid left to walk lonely hallways where there was no noise and no one would come running for him. 

Just him and the big arching naked windows that exposed him to the forest behind his house. The pool that could be a portal as blue and crystal as a mountain stream. 

He was scared, but he could no longer remember ever _not_ being scared, and Billy walked him to the room he slept in that no one else knew about. That Billy only knew about because he’d been in such a hurry and needed to clothe them both and jet. It didn’t bother him much, he noted distantly.

He thought he remembered shucking off his jeans and climbing into the bed, felt when his soft draping duvet was lowered onto him with his face sunk deep in his fluffy pillows and his body curled into a ball. He thought he heard someone leave and then come back and leave again. 

There was, between sucking dreams of tentacle-vines wrapping around him and pulling him into the cavernous earth, the faint impression of a calloused hand sifting carefully through his hair, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just a dream.

-

Billy hung a left onto Old Cherry Street as deep night fell over Hawkins. He and Steve had been there since about nine thirty in the morning and they hadn't gotten to Steve's house until nearly nine pm. It had been a hell of a day, but it wasn't anything Billy wasn't used to. Hospital trips were always longer than anticipated and Billy was an old hat at them, if he added up his and his mother’s trips over the years. 

Susan hadn’t been to the ER because of his father even once and it grated, if he was being honest. He felt like fucking Parmesan when he thought about it because he didn’t know what it was about him, what it was about his mother who’d left but still lingered in his heart as much as it stung to keep her there, that made his father want to hurt him. 

He was heading home way before he was required to be, his dad allowing him Friday nights and Saturdays for actual fun as long as Billy didn't make a nuisance of himself or get into trouble. His presence for Sunday mornings, however, was non-negotiable and he was expected to be awake, showered, and dressed for yard work and other chores. 

Neil believed he was man enough to be exempt from domestic labor, but Billy didn’t fit under that umbrella. As Neil liked to remind him, he would never be a real man, fag that he was. Weak as he was. Undisciplined. Lazy. Ungrateful. Rude. Vulgar. 

The list went on, but none of that was anything more than peripheral thoughts as Billy pulled into the driveway. His father’s truck was parked, but Susan’s car was gone and that meant date night was in full swing for them. The thought of his father fawning over his clueless, young wife was nauseating, but he would rather have them out enjoying a romantic dinner than at home where Billy was in range to be a stress relief dummy for whatever set Neil off that evening.

Walking inside, he spied Max on the couch flipping through a really girly magazine. She jerked like she was holding back from hiding it or hurrying to her room. She gave him an emotionless, prickly stare.

“I thought you’d be gone longer,” she said, purposefully tucking her nose back into the most recent issue of her mother’s Cosmo. Billy would bet good money she wasn’t even fucking reading anything. She was an asshole like that.

It made him want to smile and he felt one corner of his mouth lift. He flattened it quickly.

“You still mad, Max?” he asked, surprised at how unaffected he sounded. He was used to acting like nothing terrible was happening with people who weren’t interested in asking questions anyway, but unaffected was probably an understatement for what he felt currently. 

Max flashed him the biggest, fakest smile he’d ever seen and quipped, “Until the end of time, Billy,” and just like that, he knew they’d get past that night at the Byers’ house. 

Of course, he knew he was in the wrong. Mostly. He wasn’t a fucking idiot. But he did know something that Max didn’t understand and he’d been trying to teach her, to tell her--because she didn’t really get it, the way you could only get something if it had been laboriously nailed through your palms--what his father was going to do to her if he thought Max was seeing the Sinclair boy.  

Billy knew well what Neil did when he disapproved of something. He knew better than most what happened when you were Neil’s kid and you were doing something he thought was reprehensible. 

What they had now was a start to a conversation that wasn’t going to take place today. What they had was a tentative threshold where negotiations could begin, that perhaps one day in the next week they could pick up where they left off and get somewhere decent. Max still kind of hated him, but she was just a kid--and she wanted a big brother, he could tell, and no one had beaten that vulnerable twist off her mouth to the point where she could hide it. Not like it had been done to him--and he did, truly, want to spare her that.

The feeling of home came over him at her expression and that’s when everything that had happened since he’d left home for a simple, run-of-the-mill house party crashed over him. He was thankful that Max thought he’d been drinking all night because he felt his face turn green and barely made it into the bathroom before he grabbed hold of the toilet and vomited more pop tarts--the only thing he was willing to pilfer from Steve’s house--until it turned into dry heaving that worked stomach muscles which were already sore from the first time around.

He just laid there for a while, hot cheek against the cool toilet seat and his mind filled with images of Steve’s wrecked hand, the crunching of bone in the air around him, Hopper’s gun going off uselessly like a crack of lightning trying to stop a tornado as it churned the earth into chaos, his off-the-handle anger pumping through his every vein and artery as he bashed rats and a monster that had most of a face. Kind of a face. The face of a kid he knew, falling off like paper maché. 

His stomach churned and he groaned.

Steve had cried and cried and cried. He didn’t know anyone besides himself had that many tears inside of them. It wasn’t something he’d witnessed with scorn--he had been there for it, seen the shreds of Tommy’s body dim a light in Steve’s eyes before he was maimed. 

It had taken everything in him not to shake Steve, not to demand and yell and rave about how he shouldn’t be so fucking stupid all the time. How he shouldn’t care as much. Be more of a coward because at least cowards didn’t die. But then he knew he'd soon be explaining to Steve exactly what had happened at the hospital, the strangely quick time it took him to get in and our of surgery and discharged after Billy had handed over Steve's insurance card stating his family name. The whole ordeal seemed like punishment enough.

And the thing in Tommy, that thing which was starting to feel like it was targeting him specifically, someone who wasn’t even actually involved in this shitshow until last night. He couldn’t believe it had all happened and he was at home with a fucked up head and a gurgling stomach when he desperately wanted, down to his bones, to be curled around Steve like a protective shell.

 _Your eyes are so blue_ , Steve had told him, looking awed and out of it and bloody and dear.

He remembered his long fingers at his wrist, clenched in the cuff of his jacket, and even through the wretched, ugly fear of the monster and his own incoherent rage and Steve’s jagged cries like saws against his ears, heat blossomed knowing Steve had sought him out. Him and no one else, that he closed up like a clam around Hopper and Karen and the doctors, but not him. 

That Steve had touched _him_.

Touched him like he wanted to make sure he was there--make sure he was _real_ \--and fuck if Billy didn’t know how that felt every time he looked at Steve. It killed him to know Steve was by himself, so dazed by trauma he drifted in and out of coherency, while he twiddled his thumbs at his father’s house trying to make a decision to stay out of fear or leave out of--whatever he felt for Harrington.

He’d only just gotten back from Steve’s house and still needed to get cleaned up, regardless. As he turned the dial in the shower to scalding, he thought back to being at Steve’s house for the second time.

Hopper had stopped by to check on Steve as promised, surprised Billy was still at the house sitting on the floor next to his bed so late into the evening. He’d been listening to him wade through troubled dreams. After Hopper felt like he was sure Steve was okay, he’d driven Billy back to the gas station for Steve’s car that felt like it had been abandoned there fifty years ago instead of just one night. 

Billy had snatched the Beemer’s keys from a bowl of them on the kitchen counter before him and the chief headed out the door and he was relieved he’d grabbed the right set when the BMW opened easily.

The whole parking lot had looked totally innocuous if it weren’t for the gas station’s front door that had been blasted off its hinges.

“You, uh,” Billy asked, “You ever find that cashier?”

Hopper shook his head, “Nothing yet. Not a trace. Feds are gonna clean up the gas station, too, after they finish at the Wheeler's.”

Billy was silent for a beat and then said incredulously, “The fact that this town hasn’t been razed to the ground is amazing. Guess you aren’t doing such a terrible job after all.”

The chief looked at him in genuine surprise and said, “You’ve got balls, kid. My gun didn’t make a dent, but you rushed it with a sledge hammer and won.”

“I didn’t--,” Billy started to say, but stopped. It hung between them, though: _I didn’t win._

“You did,” Hopper insisted, “Didn’t hesitate either. You’re brave and that’s not something you should forget. Thank you.”

Billy mumbled a thanks and tried to let it go. He thought it might be a good time to dig for information. He was in a position of brief power, brief equality, with the guy who seemed to be most aware of the situation they were all in.

“How did Steve get involved with this?” he asked finally.

“Ah, yes,” Hopper considered with a smile, “You ask a question and it’s about Harrington.”

Billy bit out, unwilling to crack, “I just want to know. We went through it this weekend.”

Hopper nodded, “Yeah. You did. Look, Billy, Steve got involved the way we all got involved: by accident, circumstance, and just plain bad luck. You’re no different. We all just live here. The government’s had a lab out here for years conducting experiments on special humans--like Will, who you saw freeze that thing--until one of them opened a door. Out came--well, you saw it. Out came _that_. And we’ve been having trouble ever since.”

“That’s so…” he responded, paused, and didn’t go on.

“So simple,” Hopper agreed, reading him easily, “But it’s the simple stuff--stuff you can understand but can’t fix--that does the most damage, Billy.”

Billy didn’t have much to say to that. He felt sick. Homesick and lovesick and fearsick. Every sick he could think of so he swung open the Beemer’s door. He was about to slip into the seat when Hopper stopped him.

The chief said, “I know it’s hard for someone in your situation to feel safe enough to stick around. I get that. And I know hearing this is gonna piss you off, but listen. Steve Harrington’s going to need somebody to help him through this. I think he wants it to be you.”

And unsaid: _I think you want it to be him._

Billy thought they’d had a pretty successful conversation. He hadn’t punched anything, kept a civil tongue in his head, and gotten a bit of clarity about the evil looming over all of Hawkins. But they weren’t close like _that_. Billy wasn’t close enough to anyone to talk about his feelings for Harrington. Much less an obviously straight cop who didn’t seem to realize the extent of the _closeness_ he was encouraging.

“Thanks for the information, chief,” Billy said, a surge of defensive anger climbing up his spine, “But stop fucking _talking_.”

And then Jim Hopper, big and blond and tall as a pine tree, threw back his head and laughed. He sounded hoarse, his laugh loud but rusty. He sounded like he needed it.

“You get to curse at me this one time,” Hopper told him in surprisingly good humor, “But just the _once_. Take care of yourself, kid, I’ll be seeing you.”

And then he’d hopped in his Jeep and headed back to the station, probably, or maybe home. Everyone was back home, back in their respective boxes. Billy thought of Steve alone at home sleeping off an unwilling amputation and knew Hopper had gotten into his head, that whether he felt scared or not, he’d be checking on Steve after he showered and changed.

His absence was technically allowed. His father was firm about his presence on Sundays, but Saturdays were fair game. Allegedly.

Except things weren’t always quite that easy because his father made rules only he could break--and sometimes he did, if he wanted to justify punishing Billy. 

It was a risk. It was a risk he’d never taken for anyone because it could end badly for him, but he knew that a world where he didn’t go back to Steve today was one where he was literally killed on his way there.

-

Billy arrived at Steve’s house, a place he was quickly becoming familiar with, around eleven o’clock. He'd probably just missed his father and stepmother coming home. He’d almost been tempted to stick around and take whatever his father said head-on because he knew he'd have to be home by one to make curfew, but he was aware of the possibility that Neil might not allow him back out for whatever bullshit reason he came up with on the fly.

Because Neil made the rules. And Neil broke them, too, when it suited him. Yes, Billy was technically allowed out most of the weekend as long he was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for chores on Sunday morning--but that didn’t mean the edict was set in stone.

Neil told Billy there were rules, but Billy didn’t think that was quite right. Neil crafted commands, sure, he had a whole book of them in his head--but they were ever-changing, mercurial as ocean waves, and they shifted to suit Neil’s moods. 

He thought of his father like a many-headed beast, knowing that if one head seemed placid and calm that another head would soon be snapping at him. He learned that Neil’s moods were like weather--they dictated what he wore, how he walked, and what he organized his day around. 

His father’s moods followed him to school, sat in class with him, and unlocked the door to their house everyday. Billy raged against it, the invisible but iron control, and he always felt a hair's breadth away from shattering glass or punching brick just to know what it felt like to have a momentary release of pressure.

And if sometimes someone’s face got between his fist and the wall, then, well, it was what it was.

Never before had he valued anything above his fear of Neil’s anger, but he’d hopped in the car without saying shit to Max--they’d already had their little but significant moment, he wasn’t pushing it--and speeding all the way to Harrington’s neighborhood. 

Gunning the Camaro should have felt good, given him the roaring high it always did when he pressed hard on the gas, but all he could think about is Steve waking up alone before he got there. Steve being crushed by the silence of the huge, empty house he lived in, the silence Billy had been a little stunned by the couple times he’d been there. It had been like being in the dark heart of the forest Billy was beginning to fear. It was as dark and cool as the empty trunk of a tree. 

At night, Steve’s house looked like it was practically a tenant of the forest that was its backdrop and neighbor. Without light, without sun, the house was darker than Billy felt entirely comfortable with. He’d seen what could emerge from the shadows, how it could reach for you in the blink of an eye.

Billy had swiped the spare key Steve had mumbled to him about almost incoherently after the hospital. He’d been so out of it, so exhausted from fear and pain he’d just leaned against Billy in the hospital, leaving it up to him to speak to medical personnel through anesthesia and a procedure and rest and discharge. No one had seemed to be in a hurry until that insurance card had been handed over and then, like a flipped switch, the attending doctor had flown through a whole goddamn surgery.

Steve had barely spoken through anything, paler than Billy had ever seen him and staring at him with the pained eyes of a doe staring down the barrel of a rifle. 

He was nearly catatonic by the time they made it back to the car, Steve slumping into the passenger seat and groggily snapping the seat belt in place. Billy had been unsure how to protest such quick service, unable to do anything but accept it when the doctor told him everything had gone well, that there was pain meds for the night and a prescription to be filled in the morning, and would he get Mr. Harrington home safely. It was weird and odd and something he figured he'd have to ask Steve about later, but he couldn't argue with someone who had just treated Steve so quickly. 

So they'd left.

Driving him back was hell, not because he was a bother but because in the aftermath of the monster there was nothing to do but remember it.

And he was remembering now, again, how the walls were deep violet and fleshy like unusually smooth lungs and the shrieks they’d emitted as Billy split open Tommy’s decaying face. He’d shattered so easily, like a lightbulb. 

If Billy closed his eyes, and with the darkness welling up around him, he could feel the rain of viscous black liquid covering his entire face. He’d done what he could to clean it off right after he'd attacked it until Hopper had just handed him baby wipes, a spare white undershirt and heavy winter coat, and a towel he’d kept in the Jeep.

The chief had muttered something about having a little girl who could never keep clean either, but Billy hadn’t been listening too hard so he wasn’t entirely sure.

He’d done a better wipe down once he’d tucked Steve into bed, but none of it was going to save his favorite leather jacket that had gone straight into the trunk once they'd reached his car. Mostly, though, Billy felt lucky he’d cleaned up enough to get into his house without pinging Max’s freaky radar for suspicious activity. The kid was wary of everything, not that he blamed her. 

He pulled out the house’s spare key--and the ridiculous part of him that never fucking shut up about his Montana-sized crush on Harrington was in awe that he knew where the spare key was now--and fit it into the lock. 

He heard the satisfying turn of the key and, once unlocked, he tentatively opened the door and braced himself as even more darkness greeted him and cold air spilled out from the crack. He felt, at once, that he was somewhere sacred and grand, but it was probably the ornate crown molding getting to him.

He shut the door softly and headed into the hallway immediately before him, taking the second right into the guest bedroom Steve seemed to sleep in the most and where Billy knew he’d probably feel safest in after the disaster that was their morning at the Wheeler’s house.

He rounded the corner into the doorway and was surprised to see Steve up already, groggier but already more present and alive than before, and he was reading the  _X-Men_ comic Billy had teased him about earlier.

“Uh, hey,” Steve said, looking up from his comic with an owlish expression, “You’re, um, not covered in bloody motor oil anymore.”

Faced with a coherent Steve, as grateful as it made him feel, completely froze him and he could only respond with, “Yep.”

They both stiffened, unsure how to proceed, until Billy’s impatience and usual willing ignorance of “normal” boundaries broke through the tension.

“So are you hungry?” Billy asked, mood shifting into something a little happy and smug and excited to see Steve awake and lucid, “Because I am starving my ass off and I felt weird as fuck rummaging through your kitchen.”

Steve’s face was a little spooked, a little unsure, and a lot exhausted.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

And Billy just smiled. He’d meant to give his wide, shark grin, but something about Steve looking at him sheathed the sharp edges he’d never before managed to blunt. 

“Didn’t you hear me? Shit, you really are a dumbass. I came over for dinner,” Billy answered easily, like there was nothing else to it and no other reason to be there. Just hunger.

But, then, maybe it was that straightforward. When it came right down to it.

Steve watched him for a moment, wordless, and Billy felt that bright, good warmth flare through him when Steve moved to throw off his sheets and comforter so he could get out of bed.


	8. was it the sea? responding, maybe, to celestial force

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will wishes his body came with an instruction manual, Billy doesn't want to go home but he has to, Steve plans and dreams, and Jim reunites with an old friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Castle Byers never got destroyed in this 'verse. Just go with it. Also, let's just say Jonathan finally got his own car because his dad gave him a broken down something-or-other in a fit of trying to win him over (it didn't work, but Jonathan kept the car).

Will Byers had spent the better part of a year trying to make sense of his body again. He didn’t know why it was so small and bony, couldn’t inhabit it the way he always had after having felt the ever-growing, tidal-wave dimensions of the Mind Flayer within him. He could feel the itchy buzz of its invisible tentacles expanding for miles back when it had made its home in the tunnels of his veins.

He could almost see the motes of ash falling like snow around him, nearly taste the chilling scent of decay on his tongue. Sometimes he wasn’t sure his hands weren’t slimy, fingerless appendages. Sometimes food didn’t taste like anything but sludge and oil. Sometimes he had dreams of wasted landscapes that felt like alien ruins and sometimes he heard a booming shriek exit his mouth that was too deep and tearing to have come from a human diaphragm. 

His dreams coiled like tendrils over his face, black and creeping, and sometimes he thought they were filling his ears and his eyes and nose and mouth.

If he woke up choking on slugs that weren’t slugs but wiggling, maggot-y monster fetuses incubating in the tender bowl of his stomach--he didn’t tell anyone. Tried to pretend it wasn’t happening until it all fell onto him at once as it seemed to when the whole thing got to be too much. 

His mom often watched him pick at his food with worried eyes, concern pinching them at the corners until he thought they might disappear altogether as she grew more upset. And that was the last thing he wanted--to hurt her, to concern her. 

It was just he didn’t know how to act normal anymore. What was normal now? He figured it was enough that he was no longer growing the seeds of demented creatures inside of him. Will thought it might be that he could glance at a mirror and feel that it was just him looking back.

He and his mother had gotten home from the Wheelers’ house hours ago. His mother made call after call standing at the telephone in the kitchen, scribbling down appointment times and occasionally stifling a sob into the sleeve of her jean jacket. She’d look up at him to make sure he hadn’t seen her lapse in calm and he’d avert his eyes to the random book he’d grabbed from his backpack and spread open to an unread page on his lap.

His mother had long since fussed over him and made dinner and, exhausted, given him a kiss on the forehead and made her way to her bedroom for a nap while promising the door was open if he needed her for anything at all.

He was still sitting in the same spot, the sun fading into sepia slats of light falling over the floor, when the front door jiggled as a key was placed in the lock.

Jonathan had been out all day, having a picnic with Nancy and then taking her to the movies. He couldn’t remember what they’d gone to see. He couldn’t remember if he’d asked. 

“Hey, squirt,” his brother greeted him as he walked through the door, running an extremely gentle hand through Will’s hair. Something about Jonathan resisted any reproach Will might have felt towards him for his babying. Jonathan had always been gentle with the things around him. He handled his camera like a newborn. He hugged their mother like she was half-butterfly, half-woman. He was the sort of gentle that spoke more of doing no harm than shyness, like he thought if he didn't practice an unnecessary amount of restraint he might dent someone.

He’d always been gentle and now that he had reason to be, Will didn’t fault him for it.

He half-heartedly batted at Jonathan’s hand and replied, “Hey.”

The day had been long and, as was now becoming habit, the tiredness left him completely speechless. Talking had never been his forte, but now it felt like a weakness--that he couldn’t do it. Didn’t know how to let anyone in or any words out.

Will didn’t intend to tell Jonathan anything about today’s events anyway. Not tonight, maybe not ever.

He and his mom had decided, for once, that Jonathan didn’t need to worry about something they themselves weren’t sure of. There wasn’t much to report outside of some terribly uneducated guesses about the state of Will’s brain and his sudden acquisition of abilities he didn't want anyway. Will already knew there was something wrong with him without the powers. With them, it was unbearable. He felt trapped by the invisible chains of having hosted a being of rot and madness and having survived it.

And he knew now, knew it like he knew to brush his teeth and pretend the voice in his head wasn't there whenever possible: surviving it didn't mean much more than the continuation of his heartbeat.

Everything else was forfeit.

Joyce tried her best to make the rest of the day feel like a regular Saturday despite how much it obviously wasn’t. She’d run herself ragged trying to comfort him. Like he deserved it, like he could even feel it. He craved the attention and he couldn't help but hate himself for needing it. It felt too much like what had been done to him--taking and taking until there was nothing left. And he'd realized however strong Joyce was, she was incredibly vulnerable, too, because she loved him too much.

She loved him too much. And that was dangerous because he was just becoming a boy again before the voice had come back. He couldn't trust himself and she refused to believe she couldn't trust him.

His mom had been fallen asleep right after she’d made one of Will’s favorite dinners: chicken tetrazzini. Even after the possession, the comforting mix of noodles and chicken and cheese and mushroom satisfied the very human boy he was trying again to be.

“Where’s mom?” Jonathan asked as he grabbed a Coke from the door of the fridge and plopped down next to Will on the couch. He was completely relaxed, their faces shadowed by the dying light. He seemed content.

“In her room,” Will replied, flashing his brother a quick smile, “She said she’d just lay down for a minute after dinner, but you know how that goes.”

Jonathan laughed softly, picking up the remote and turning on the TV. The illumination from the screen hit his cheeks and forehead, made him look like a little boy at an arcade for all that he was years older than Will.

“At least she’ll get a good night’s sleep,” he said, an amused smile lingering on his face.

Will stared at him for a moment, noting the changes in his face. He seemed tanner and healthier, his eyes bright and his sandy hair shiny. While Will had been away in another dimension and then struggling the possession of his body, Jonathan had grown handsome. 

And happy.

It was a development Will had mixed feelings about, which made him feel ashamed. There was a small part of him that tried and failed to reconcile the fact that while Will was being tortured by the Mind Flayer, Jonathan was growing up and growing more open and falling in love.

It wasn’t a fair feeling. Will chose to focus on how happy his brother looked, thinking everything was alright in the world, and knew that while he couldn’t shield his brother from the truth forever--he would do his best to keep him from Will’s powers for as long as possible. 

 _It was supposed to be you_ , he thought unbidden, flecks and echoes of monstrous sound falling over him like hail. The words that followed him like a ripple in water spreading outwards and outwards. He couldn’t get far enough away from them. The words pushed and tugged at him until he’d been staring into blue eyes that were clear and angry and bewildered. Billy Hargrove standing in front of his car yelling at him burned like a campfire in his memory. He didn't know how to fix this.

He didn't know how to make the Flayer go away. He wished it was all over. Afraid, afraid. Always afraid.

“I was thinking about going to my fort,” Will said suddenly, trying not to bite his lip, “You wanna come with me?”

His brother, who’d been sipping his cold drink and flipping between Golden Girls and The Twilight Zone, turned towards him suddenly with an expression that was careful and inquiring.

Will cursed in his head, knowing he’d said the wrong thing. He couldn't help it, though. It was just so hard to know what the right thing was. No one liked that he continued to want to play at Castle Byers, but it only because he didn’t have the words to tell them what it meant to him. 

To them the fort was an isolated spot in the woods where anything could take him, a reminder of how terribly alone he’d been where they couldn't reach him, but to him it had been a safe spot when there’d been no one but him in that whole, wide, dark world. Just him and the wind howling like a bobcat when the Mind Flayer was hunting and the deadly silence when it was merely watching and he'd huddled in it until the tears froze to his face and his pulse was a slow thud under his jaw.

With its entrance into the human world again, he didn't know where to turn. Didn't know how to hide. Kept blurting things out he shouldn't have.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” asked Jonathan, a wrinkle in his brow that made him resemble Joyce so much Will almost smiled, which would have been another faux pas so he didn’t.

Will nodded with certainty and said, “I’m not trying to go alone. We had a family meeting and everyone voted that I could go if someone went with me. It’s still light outside. There’s still time.”

Which was funny because there most certainly was not still time. It was back. The Mind Flayer was back and he could feel it back, could feel its malice seeping into the human world like an oil spill in the Gulf. It spread and infected everything even if no one else could see it.

He could--stop it, for a time. He sensed that about himself now. But its presence had shifted the world around it, bent the world around it by simply moving into the atmosphere. The rules around it were different and that meant nobody could tell what they were up against. It was a worry he desperately wanted to withhold from his brother. If he could just huddle in his fort for an hour and huddle under the dusty blankets that smelled like wind-song and earth, maybe he could pull himself together enough to pretend a little longer.

Jonathan seemed to mull everything over and though his smile turned pinched, he countered with, “I don’t think it’s a good idea today, buddy. It'll be dark sooner than you think. Besides, there’s stuff to do inside.”

Will backed off, the desire for the sense of safety the fort offered a quiet longing in the face of wanting Jonathan to be unworried again. To be full of the light he had only just gained. To be untouched by Will’s darkness and the voice in Will’s head and blackouts that led Will to the feet of monsters taller than the sky.

He asked, a touch disappointed, “Okay. Like what?”

“Like, um--,” Jonathan began, eyes tracing over the walls like an activity would just pop out.

“Like what?” Will repeated with repressed laughter in his voice.

His brother quirked a smile and nudged him with his shoulder.

“Cut it out, Will. I was just gonna say let’s...let’s bake some cookies. You ever bake anything before?”

Will perked up at the idea of dessert. His mom loved to bake, but the ingredients for desserts were usually too much of an expense for their already tight budget. He got used to watching his mom stare at and then square her shoulders and pass right by sprinkles and packs of cream cheese and boxes of powdered sugar in the supermarket. It had triggered a love of sweets in him somehow, like every time he at a piece of cake or licked at a scoop of ice cream he was dedicating it to her.

“No,” Will responded, lips pulling into a wide grin that felt strange on his face, “Do we even have everything we need for them?”

Jonathan grinned back and for a second, the world slotted softly into place like it had taken a picture of the two of them peering into each other, a moment that would satiate Will later when the darkness billowed back into his body like curtains blowing through an open window. 

This was his. His time with his brother.

Who knew how many more moments he'd get? Will wasn't an idiot and he didn't think he qualified as a child anymore. People who were special tended to get hurt and the monster who threatened their lives never seemed to die. Instead, it culled the living things around it like a scythe swinging through wheat. He had to enjoy good things while he could. 

Delighted and subtly playful, Jonathan pulled his keys out of his pockets and jingled them enticingly, “Just need to go pick up some eggs and chocolate chips. Get your shoes on.”

-

Billy was excited and happy about Steve getting out of bed until Steve immediately got a case of the leg jellies and slumped forward. He barely caught him in time but he did, Steve’s weight solid and making him grunt at the impact, and he tried to gently deposit Steve back onto his bed. 

“I thought you were alright, Harrington, I’m sorry,” Billy apologized before the words caught up to him. He didn’t know the last time he’d apologized to anyone.

Steve slurred, tired but awake, “I’m a little engine who can.”

Billy was relieved but merely rolled his eyes, took a deep breath, and slung Steve over his shoulder in a fireman carry. As far as he was concerned, lifting weights didn’t mean shit if he couldn’t transport a single human body. 

“Hey,” Steve groaned, struggling a bit, “Be delicate with the china, it’s one-of-a-kind. Are you fucking serious? I’m heavy, you dick.”

Billy was undeterred and his stomach was growling and he had one hour to get fed and his fill of Harrington before driving back to his house. Again. For the second time in a day of trips to hell. He put a firm, impersonal arm across the backs of Steve’s legs like a band. 

Being close to Steve was amazing. Being close to Steve while he was on pain meds and sore and exhausted? Not exactly a turn on.

“Choo choo,” Billy muttered. Steve was a surprisingly pliant sack of potatoes after the initial protest. It must have been a combination of the medication and the desire for food, he decided. That and some part of Steve was probably in shock after the amputation and the surgery and the disorientation of locations Billy had dragged him to and from.

“Can you walk any faster?” Steve said in a brattier tone than Billy had ever heard him speak with and he’d shit-talked him on the basketball court where Steve was arguably at his ice-princess brattiest. 

Billy basically galloped the last few steps into the kitchen, committing Steve’s little  _eep_ to memory because it was hilarious, and then carefully boosted him onto a section of the long kitchen counter.

“I’m gonna pretend you didn’t say shit about my chauffeuring abilities,” Billy chided him with a raised eyebrow while fighting a smile, “And you can tell me if you have anything quick and easy I can make.”

Steve went to lean back on his hands, but stopped himself, wincing hard with a, “Fuck, I am not used to that,” and then he went silent as he dealt with the soreness of pressure against his hand.

But Billy, who was clean and in his own clothes and alone with Steve Harrington and grappling with whatever fucking filth-monster had ruined their day right along with him, was not letting whatever internalization that was going on inside of Harrington to continue.

He ended up leaning over his planted forearms on the counter, giving Steve an evaluating side stare.

“No, pretty boy, don’t do that. What are you trying not to say?”

“Nothing,” Steve bit out, snapping like a wild dog who’d barely made it out of a fight alive, “Just _fuck_ . _Fuck_ this.”

Billy licked his lips, nodding along, listening intently. He really couldn’t say much to that. He had nothing sympathetic to respond with that Steve would want to listen to right now anyway. And, yes, there were things Billy wanted to tell Steve, plenty of things that Billy had wrapped up like gifts inside of himself, planning to never open and expose because they would spoil everything. 

Just like Steve had almost spoiled everything by _dying_.

And then that thought hit, and Billy's temper lit up like a stick of dynamite.

“Yeah,” Billy agreed meanly, “Fuck this. But what did you fucking think was going to happen when you stepped up to that fucking thing? What was that, Harrington? _I can’t hear you_.”

And just like always, Billy veered without meaning to straight into aggressive and accusatory. He wanted to hit himself, but to be perfectly honest, he also wanted to see what Steve was going to say to defend his dumb, terrible, stupid actions.

For Billy, when he had feelings for someone, somehow they always seemed to turn back into anger. And he was, he realized, sitting in the warm lighting of Steve’s luxurious kitchen. He was so mad. He’d been so scared.

For a minute, Steve looked like he was going to bite back like everyone always bit back with Billy. They’d look at him, betrayal shining in their limip simpering eyes, and they’d back down. Play the martyr, play the victim. Billy loved things and then he scared them into not loving him. Look at Max. Look at Susan, who at the very beginning, had been a gentle and supportive maternal figure. 

But then he’d gotten angry--never this angry, though, oh no. Steve was special. Had always been special. Billy had never been so hung up on someone, wanting him so badly that he could settle for being his defender, his mouth-frothing protector, in this fucked up, brave, new world. He wasn’t any better than an animal, but he was trying to keep the other boy safe and that promise had been made fraudulent, untrue, a failure of a pledge because the person he was trying to save was an absolute fucking _moron_.

Steve opened his mouth, but then Billy decided he wasn’t fucking done yet.

“Do you have any idea how close you were to dying?” Billy raged, zero to sixty within seconds and a huge part of him didn’t want to antagonize a boy who’d just gone through an amputation in a room that seethed with disease and inhuman malice. But the small part of him, the burning angry part that always seemed to win out, wanted answers.

“You aren’t a fighter. You don’t have the drive, you don’t want to hurt anyone. You fight to subdue and you ain’t ever gonna be able to simply subdue a beast, Harrington. It’s fight to kill or nothing at all. I had to watch you plead with something that wasn’t fucking _human_ and it broke you while screaming about toys. This isn’t a _game_ , Steve, those little nerdy chipmunks you run with don’t know shit about what that thing can do or you would know better. So I want to know what the fuck you were thinking. And I want to know _now_.”

By the end of it, Billy knew he’d controlled himself enough to speak with an even tone. He’d never been much for yelling, but he had anger issues like a motherfucker and while he wanted to confront Steve, wanted to push his buttons and make him _leave_ so Billy would stop hoping he’d stick around, he didn’t want to scare him. 

Not now. Not ever again.

And the whole time Billy had been staring straight into Steve’s sweet brown eyes. Sometimes they were lit up with sarcasm, sometimes silliness. But they were always toasty and warm, made Billy think about fall and jackets with deep pockets and the pumpkin bread his mom always made growing up.

Steve was staring back at him, too, hadn’t looked away. Hadn’t flinched. He’d stared him in the face while Billy went off on him even though he just wanted to feed both of them and ask questions about the hospital and soak up the warmth of that infuriating kindness.

Steve had only looked irritated when Billy had first snapped at him. Then his face had calmed, his forehead unfurrowed, and his mouth soft and a little open like he was so busy concentrating on Billy he couldn’t be bothered to put in the effort to close it.

“Hargrove, I--,” Steve started and closed his eyes briefly to think and opened them again to correct himself, “ _Billy_. I was thinking...I was thinking that I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn’t tried for him. All of us could have died. And I’m not the one who rushed that thing.”

A beat of silence and Billy’s lips twitched, “True. But I exiled that fucker.”

“Yeah,” replied Steve heavily, “You did. I’m gonna be honest. I’m glad I didn’t have to watch you kill it. Not while it was in Tommy’s body--what was left of it.”

Billy clenched his teeth, “I’m not going to apologize for hurting that thing after it maimed you.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Steve sighed, “Just being honest, like I said. You were honest with me. I--I want to be honest with you.”

They stared at each other, warm chestnut brown eyes against a tidal wave of blue, and Steve chuckled. Faintly, but it was audible.

“What?” Billy bit out. Tense but receptive. And surprised Steve would take the time to explain what he wanted from them, from the _us_ they were becoming. Not fighting, not a quiet agreement to never speak of today ever again, but honesty. Honesty implied _more_ , implied longevity.

Steve raised his brows at Billy, “I’m not going to apologize either.”

Billy stared blankly at him and then started laughing, his eyes curving and little laugh lines appearing. Steve swallowed and cleared his throat, unable to look away.

“I’ve got pizza,” he blurted out, “In the freezer.”

Billy was grinning now, wild and open and aimed right at him. _Bullseye_ , Steve thought very quietly to himself. He moved as confidently in a kitchen he didn’t know the layout of as he did everywhere else. Steve was struck again by the memory of Billy’s first day of school, when he’d stepped out of his car and flicked his cigarette without looking onto the ground like he’d done it a thousand times before.

Billy was just someone who knew how to handle space. Steve wasn’t so bad at that himself, but with Billy it seemed more instinctive like he'd never been in a room he hadn't completely made his own. 

“Supreme? That’s high class taste you got there,” Billy teased him gleefully. He seemed at ease, openly looking at Harrington, relieved there wasn’t anyone else in the room to pay attention to. Lucky for him, nobody else was ever here.

Which brought him to a question.

“Billy,” Steve addressed him as he slid the pizza into the pre-heated oven and Billy turned his way with an inquisitive expression, “What are you doing here?”

When Billy raised his eyebrows and pointed an obnoxious hitchhiker’s thumb to the pizza in the oven, Steve scrubbed his hair with his good hand.

“No, dipshit, I know that’s not it. I mean--why’d you come back? You already did your civic duty and got me...sewn up? And dropped me off, too.”

Billy stared at the ridiculous person in front of him. Of course, he knew what Steve was asking and he was more than allowed to ask all the questions he wanted. Didn’t mean he was going to get all the answers he was asking for, though. 

Billy tried another smile, but it hardly counted because he was thinking about their ER trip, “Steve, you had the remaining flap of skin from your finger sewn shut to close up your wound. I’m not a doctor, but that was my understanding of their whole spiel. Turns out the fucker left enough to avoid a skin graft.”

Steve looked at his bandaged hand, so neat with its white gauze and medical tape. It was really gone. So gone he’d seen a doctor and they’d just sealed the wound because there was nothing left to reattach. His stomach clenched and he kept staring, flinching away the auditory replay of the crunch of his finger between those dozens of teeth.

Flicking his eyes up to Billy, he said, “Lucky me.”

Billy got closer, sliding a few inches closer until the side of his arm was touching Steve’s thigh. He felt a shudder go through Steve before he settled like a spooked horse that had been deftly soothed. 

“No,” Billy frowned sympathetically, “Not lucky you. But I do have a question. Steve, those ER docs didn’t give one flying shit about us until they realized who you were. After that, it was like...they were racing to get done with you. Your surgery happened in a flash and once you woke up from anesthesia they let you out like a bat out of hell. What was that about?”

Normally, Steve wouldn’t care to go down this avenue of discussion, but it was beginning to dawn on him just how much Billy had done for him when he’d been delirious and in shock and unable to even fake coherency. And he’d told Billy he wanted them to be honest with each other.

Even if he was starting to freak out as he put the pieces together.

“My dad’s loaded,” Steve said, biting his lip, “Like,  _loaded_ loaded. He and my mom do a lot of philanthropic stuff, like, you know, donations to save the whales and whatnot. Well, he donated money for an entire wing of our local hospital years ago. People still know him there. I must have gotten one of the doctors who did and, barring that, once they looked me up and saw my parent’s phone number--well, they probably called him. And he probably let them know what he wanted.”

Billy was staring at Steve and he knew he was gaping.

“He what now? Steve, are you telling me your dad is one of those rich assholes who order other people around while they do lines of coke off strippers’ asses.”

Steve couldn’t help but laugh softly. Leave it to Billy to make a painful explanation a little less painful in the least sensitive way possible.

“I don’t know about the last part, but the asshole bit and the barking orders stuff is right-on.”

“Okay, but I still don’t understand why they booted you out if you’re, like, the golden boy of their dear Daddy Warbucks.”

Steve smiled, but it was bitter, “No, that was part of the order. He didn’t want me to stay for a procedure he knew wouldn’t take long. He didn’t want anyone to see my, uh, stupid self-inflicted wound. Think of the rumors,” he said in a higher pitched voice, no doubt a mimicry of some old fucking hag in a cocktail dress.

Billy still didn’t understand, and he said, “I didn’t know your family was so important that your dad’s keeping you from the public eye.”

Steve nodded and flicked one golden curl softly off Billy’s forehead, a touch lighter than a feather that sent a thrill up his spine, “We’re not. But my dad’s a delusional egomaniac and he’s got money to throw around so people won’t tell him otherwise.”

Billy took Steve in and noted that he was still too pale, not back to his olive complexion yet. His hair was long and flatter than usual and emphasized the unconventional square shape of Steve’s face. He was such a mix of masculine and feminine features, like he had the best of both worlds, but nothing beat the warmth of his eyes. 

He should have still been in the hospital in a bed where people who knew what the fuck they were doing could take care of him. But he wasn't and that was apparently his father's fault.

“That’s fucked,” Billy told him bluntly.

“It is fucked,” Steve replied and as he spoke the timer for the pizza went off and Steve and Billy both salivated, though Steve also took the time to enjoy Billy slipping on oven mitts covered in illustrations of kittens in teacups. He said a silent thank you to his mother for that particular vision.

After that it didn’t seem there was much to discuss, especially when they both considered that they’d eaten nothing for many stress-filled hours. The crunchy crust and the soft mushrooms and the tangy red sauce hit like ecstasy. 

And it was all made better by the fact that Billy simply made them plates and boosted himself up onto the counter beside Steve as they dug in.

-

After Billy left--with an extended amount of eye contact that made Steve’s mouth go dry before he flicked him on the nose like an asshole and told him not to lose anymore fingers tonight--Steve was at a loss for what to do. 

He was tired, possibly more tired than he’d ever been in his life, but the idea of laying down in a dark room completely defenseless and alone for the long nighttime hours just sounded like pure stupidity to him.

Upon shutting the door and locking it, he stared out the window as Billy walked tall and straight-backed to his car. He reminded Steve of a soldier whose allegiance belonged only to himself, someone too strong to have attachments weighing him down.

But that wasn’t true, was it?

Because he’d spent this weekend defending _him_. It wasn’t anything Billy had admitted, but he'd planted himself at Steve's side. Snarled and flung himself like a beserker at every new, fresh hell that had ambushed them. He'd had an eye or a hand on Steve since this whole shit show began. 

It was significant. It meant something. To him. 

He shook his head hard. Not the time to think about this, numb from the good pain meds he’d gotten at the hospital and a prescription for the rest right where Billy had placed it on the counter along with his surgeon’s physical therapy referral. 

Billy’s car started up, engine roaring alive and headlights blaring, and it took off like a rocket. Steve got the impression that Billy had a curfew or something, which was pretty fucking uncharacteristic of everything he knew about him. Another surprising thing about Billy added the the list he hadn't even realized he'd started about him.

Turning, he was faced with an empty house. A bitter feeling rose in his gut and it was sour and gritty and awful to behold. He was alone, a position he found himself in a lot. Where Billy was clearly unnerved by the dark corners of the house, Steve was used to it and more scared of everything right outside of it--namely, the woods which housed something old and terrible and stinking and invasive.

It had taken something from him, twisted his nerves and his sense of self until he stood here shaking, angry, tears welling up, missing Billy and the slick burn of pizza against the roof of his mouth. The ocean smell Billy had when his cologne had long worn off. Just skin and curls and stubbornness.

Steve was meant to be around people. He _wanted_ to be around people. He was meant to argue with Billy and laugh with Nancy and Jonathan, fuss at the kids for thinking they were grown enough to take on an apocalyptic nightmare.

And always-- _oh, always_ , and he squeezed his eyes and wetness welled there and dropped like the tears were inevitable as the waxing and waning of the moon--he ended up alone. And he was too ashamed to admit how deeply that cut.

He needed to go to sleep at some point, which he was realizing meant one thing: he needed to prepare for it.

Steve walked slowly back to the kitchen, not yet acclimated to the numbness in his right hand or the dead tired feeling causing him to feel lightheaded, groggy like he wasn’t sure he was up or down anymore. Being with Billy was helpful because Steve couldn’t fucking _make_ him up. 

Without him, he wasn’t so sure about the dimensions of his own body. It was like the edges of him were blurry and bleeding into the air around him, the once clearly defined borders of his hands and shoulders and legs and thoughts and self had shifted into more ambivalent territory. He felt bigger than himself, but smaller than the towering shadows and tall pines around him.

He decided he'd go get his bat from where Billy propped it up in his room against the dresser. He left knowing exactly where his next weapon was coming from.

Once he entered the kitchen, he quickly walked over the what he had designated as the “sharp shit” drawer where he tended to place all the kitchen stuff that was pointy (steak knives and paring knives and onion-chopping knives and pizza cutters and the like) where he pulled out a long knife that looked like it could drive through an eye straight through the back of a head. 

Of course, he wasn’t dealing with human heads, but it was the only basis of comparison he had. 

Weapon acquired, knife handle rapidly warming the fist of his left hand, he thought about his next step. He knew he was going to pull a move he hadn’t since middle school and he knew it was the only way he was going to relax even slightly. A distant part of him knew that most people didn't have to worry about this level of paranoia, that there was usually multiple people in a house at night, several people breathing and sleeping near each other if something went bump in the night.

That wasn't Steve's reality and some part of him, growing louder with each passing day, was yelling at him to realize that and act accordingly. 

He gathered all the sheets he could from his usual room and dragged them over the couch in the cavernous and crystal-decorated living room. He eyed the couch, noting how high its back and thinking how he’d sink into the cushions. That wasn’t good; he wouldn’t even have a running chance if he slept there.

The tears had dried on his cheeks already, but he could feel their pathways on face. They made him feel strangely untouchable. Set apart. Proof of an otherness that had brushed against him and left a mark. 

He wanted Billy back. He thought he’d be the one person who could expel all the bad things in this house, even if it was because he was too bullheaded and obnoxious to take note of the threats they presented.

He didn’t want to think about so many things, he thought to himself, as he finally lay down on the floor where he could jump up easily and run in any direction. He laid the knife and his bat next to his pillow and tried his best to get comfortable on the floor.

He laid there like a discarded puppy in a house no one in town had the keys to thinking about how little he wanted to face his parents or the phone call that would surely have to be made tomorrow. He didn’t want to think about going back to school, a place where Tommy wasn’t and would never be again and see all the places they’d made each other laugh. 

He didn’t want anyone to see how he wasn’t whole any longer. He didn’t want the whispers of the kids in his class and he didn’t want the PT that he would have to go through or the idea that he might never get back all the feeling in his right hand.

Right as he dropped off there was a flash of something he did want to think about but didn’t know how to let himself--Billy’s grip on his side and something deadly and devoted flashing in his eyes. 

But then he was transported: there was an almost-light on him, like the light of the moon, and all he could see is where his shoes stepped in the shallowest of puddles. Everything sounded like dripping faucets and the moment after rainfall. His little, unsure footsteps produced wading sounds as he moved through the littlest amount of water he could only see as he stepped in it.

It felt like he was on a vast plane of pitch black. He didn’t like it and his footsteps produced echoes and he just continued taking tentative steps that grew into full out sprinting as he tried to find an exit or someone else or real light. The air around him didn’t feel like air at all and he didn’t know if he was breathing oxygen or if he hadn’t taken a breath since he'd gotten here.

When he looked down, his hand didn’t have gauze wrapped around it and the full scope of his finger’s absence glared up at him. He wanted to hide from himself, but he mostly didn’t have enough energy to expend in disgust at his appearance. 

Where was he? Was he dreaming...and if he was, was it _his_ dream? Or something else's dream?

He was running at full speed and panting and those sounds rang out like a full orchestra, deafening him as his panic grew. Reminding himself that this wasn't real wasn't helping and didn't feel true. 

Then came a drop--it was like he ran off the side of a cliff and he was falling rapidly, without end, unable to know when the ground would take him and break him.

There was a sudden landing that felt like a jolt of electricity running through him and then he was immobile. He could hear owls and crickets and all manner of forest creatures making forest sounds. The air was thicker--it felt thick and humid as an Indiana night--he felt the ground beneath him. 

It was only then he heard a reedy male voice say, “Jesus, poor kid,” and then a badly repressed heave. 

“Hold onto your stomach, deputy,” came Hopper’s dry reply.

From his vantage point on the forest’s dirt floor, with the leaves rustling as if a train of ghosts were drifting past them continuously, Steve knew that he was not in his own body. 

This was a _dream_. It was a dream of someone else’s and he’d run headlong into it because he needed to escape that strange in-between world where he could hear himself too clearly. And here he was in a body, not his own, which was laid flat on the earth staring up and now that Steve had the chance to think of it, he realized the eyes he was seeing out of weren’t blinking. They were open, vacant, not a flutter of life behind them besides Steve paralyzed and almost disbelieving.

“I can’t imagine what in the hell happened to him, chief,” the deputy said in a low, scared voice.

Then the deputy and Hopper leaned into Steve’s field of vision shining their flashlights directly into Steve’s eyes and blinding him. They were peering closely at his face with transparent expressions of revulsion and pity. That didn’t bode well for the person this used to be. 

Steve was beginning to feel what he could only describe as...damage. Something was wrong with the stomach and something had torn the neck and he had a terrible feeling that something was in the mouth, lounging in the bloody dead mouth like it was a pool and draping over the lips and resting on the chin like vines.

“I don’t know of any disease that would do this,” Hopper began to speculate. He didn’t seem to know how to go on.

The deputy dropped the arm holding the flashlight, affording Steve a bit of sight, as he held his stomach and clenched his eyes shut. He let out a groan that spoke of nausea and an inability to reconcile what he was looking at with reality.

He managed to cough out, “It’s like the black death met some fucked up gardening. He looks like a science experiment that died after being tortured."

Hopper made a sound of acknowledged that didn’t communicate much of anything. 

“I’ve got a few ideas about what happened,” he said, considering, “But I think I need to call the right coroner. Regular one isn’t gonna cut it.”

“What do you mean?”

Hopper sighed, moved his flashlight away from the face Steve was stuck behind, and Steve got to take a good long look at him. He was such a hardy man, you wouldn’t think to check for vulnerabilities, but Steve was surprised to find he spotted many of them: swollen bags beneath his eyes, he’d lost a little weight in his torso and arms that spoke of few opportunities for meals, his lips were the kind of chapped that smacked of dehydration, and Steve thought he might have noticed a very subtle eye tic.

Hopper needed about 33 hours of good uninterrupted sleep to regain some of his color and vitality. Steve could relate.

Hopper’s eyes flicked up and to the left, presumably where the deputy was trying not to lose his shit, and rumbled out, “County coroner isn’t equipped to deal with what looks to be potentially bio-hazardous fluids. We’re calling in the feds.”

And as Steve looked on at the frank police discussion of what must have been the dead body he was inside of, Hopper disintegrated in front of his eyes and he screamed at the vanishing, the clamp on his real mouth he didn’t even realize was there loosening as he emptied his fear into the air and he was back in the in-between place of water lapping at his toes.

In the distance came a startled screeching. Something had awoken when he’d returned to this place. He thought it might be the Flayer, or whatever part of the Flayer stayed here in this empty, barren nothingness.

He heard the screech again and then the sound of rushing water like a huge wave was nearing him. He opened his mouth to scream again and he found, shockingly, that he was back in his body.

Back on the floor of his house. Back to Steve Harrington's fortress of fucking solitude.

His hands flew out and he relaxed when they touched the weapons, undisturbed and waiting to be of use.

Sunday morning light was streaming through the window. He didn’t get up, relieved to have made it through the night, confused by the crazy dream that had taken him through bits of existence that almost didn’t make sense to him. None of it could be real, but then nothing yesterday had seemed real while it was happening. 

The timing made Steve worried and weary, made him want the infectious cheer of Dustin or the scathing practicality of Mike or Max’s pretend-not-to-care-but-I-totally-care attitude. Those kids could get through anything, weren’t damaged the way he’d come _into this_ damaged. They didn’t question if they deserved to be there. They didn’t worry they weren’t smart enough or that they were in the way.

Steve wasn’t especially popular at school anymore, had never been important to his parents, he could count all his friends on his fingers, and he’d never been more than an insignificant bug in the fight against the Flayer. 

But now. Now he’d had a piece of his body taken and ingested by that fucking thing. He’d gone toe to toe with it and lost, but he’d stepped up to it without a second thought. Billy Hargrove kept staring at him and snapping at him and touching him. He’d had a dream he was a corpse that he wasn’t entirely sure was a dream at all.

He took a deep breath. He needed to start the day before his emotions kept him from getting up until Monday.

People made to-do lists when they had a lot on their minds, right? Nancy’s was always, like, three pages long. His wouldn’t be long and he’d keep it in his head instead of writing it down, but he thought it was a good idea, a way to compensate for how weak and strung out he was feeling. 

It was simple, really. Go get your medicine. Call your parents. Shower.

Go out in the backyard. Start practicing swinging your bat with the other hand. Get used to it. Cry, scream, rage, break something, but keep swinging.

 _Don’t stop_ , Steve told himself, taking a breath, _just don't stop until you think you could kill something._

-

Hopper was driving into town Monday morning, the cold prickling the hair on the back of his neck even huddled in his winter coat. He wiggled his toes in irritation. It was his steel toe boots that were betraying him. They steel toes were ice cold since he’d left his boots outside for the night.

They’d been covered in gunk he hadn’t had the energy to clean off. When Billy Hargrove had busted open the Flayer like a goddamn piñata, he’d caused an eruption of that sickly black fluid that now coated Hopper’s best boots.

After the Wheeler House and Joyce and Will and the boys and fucking Karen on a rampage before he’d just told her to lose her shit with a government agent because his business hours were _over_ , he’d been called to a goddamn murder scene in the middle of the fucking woods. After that, he'd driven home in a haze. His eyes drooped and he couldn’t stop yawning.

He’d driven up to his cabin and shucked off his boots because he was not about to clean them after the day he’d had. They could wait--but now not only were they filthy, the low temperature had seeped into his steel toes and his feet felt like they were chattering. 

Lately, with everything going on, he was getting to the office earlier and earlier. With El around, he wasn’t drinking nearly as much late into the night and snapping awake at the crack of dawn had become habitual and that's just how it was going to be for the foreseeable future. He had no plans to scar her with the ugly truth of alcoholism and he wouldn’t put it past her to get fed up and smash all his bottles of liquor while he was at work.

So when he woke up this morning and shoved his feet in his boots, he knew what was coming. It was going to be a cold hour or so where his feet were concerned while the steel hugging his toes warmed with body heat. 

He started to drive past Benny’s diner and, after a short hesitation, pulled his Jeep into a parking space that faced the storefront. He could use all the warmth he could get in the form of a cheddar and ham omelet. He hadn’t seen Benny since all this hoopla with the other world had started, too, and realized he missed his friend.

He pulled open the diner door and the little bell tinkled. There were some older couples enjoying a leisurely breakfast tucked in the further corner of the restaurant where it was the warmest. A mother and her two children were absorbed in plates stacked with pancakes and syrup. 

Summoned by the bell, Benny opened the door to the back kitchen to greet his new customer and he smiled wide when he spotted Hopper.

“Hey, man,” Benny said, easy and genuine, “What took you so long to come visit? Thought you’d moved outta this town or something."

Hopper patted his tummy and said, completely straight-faced, “Been watching my figure, Benny, I’ve been feeling sensitive about my weight lately.”

And Benny didn’t laugh--because he didn’t laugh easy and he wasn’t one to fake-laugh--but he held out one giant palm. It was strong as a bear’s when Hopper clasped it. There was something unique about having a bond with another veteran. It was the way they could read each other, the way they could celebrate the other person’s survival with something that bordered on affection.

“Take a seat,” Benny said and let Hopper lead him to a little two-person tabletop by the window. Hopper liked the chill of winter. Where the people around him shrunk as the cool crept up the sleeves of their jackets, clasped their bare necks as they shuddered, Hopper welcomed the jolt. He just felt alive and good and here.

But even he could agree that the frozen solid steel toes were a bit much. Window seat, though, no matter what was non-negotiable.

After Hopper ordered his usual cheese-filled omelet and Benny disappeared back into the kitchen looking content with his lot in life to cook for sleepy townspeople, Hopper thought through the last couple of days.

There was a lot to unpack. He was never going to forget Steve Harrington’s terror. Or Billy Hargrove’s rage at his pain. Or that boy's ravaged corpse in the woods.

Nothing about yesterday had been remotely normal and if he were the type of man to give into panic, he’d probably not have gotten out of bed that morning. But there were things to do and, at the center of everything, a little girl who he still didn’t know how to connect with all the time but damn did he love her.

He could smell the food before he saw it, the fluffy white and yellow of egg and the sumptuous smell of pork and the creamy ooze of cheddar. Benny had his ever-present kitchen towel slung over his shoulder, the tied apron spotless and tidy, and he set the plate in front of Hopper with a smile.

Before he dug in, he cocked a curious look up at Benny and asked, “It still just you back there? When are you gonna get someone else?”

It was a question he wouldn’t have considered asking two years ago when Benny’s wife Collette had left him. They’d run their business for seventeen years, together, just the two of them--but Benny found after their split he’d lost a business partner as well as a spouse.

He’d been real broken up about it for a long while. Hopper knew how that was, so he didn’t ask. Today, though, in the bright cold morning so characteristic of December in Indiana, it felt okay to prod at him. Benny looked like he was doing okay.

“Matter of fact,” Benny replied, “I did get someone else. A high school kid walked in the day the ad ran in the newspaper. Introduced himself, had kitchen experience. Couldn’t have dreamed for such a quick answer.

“Well, alright,” Hopper said happily, “I’m glad you’ll have some help around here.”

Benny sighed in relief, “Honestly, so am I. Saturdays have been hitting like a monsoon,” and then he rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, “Billy’s coming in today for training, I almost forgot.”

Hopper paused with a forkful of piping hot egg right in front of his mouth. He forced himself to make a noise to show that he was listening and took the bite, chewing quickly.

When he swallowed, he said casually, “Billy, huh? Sounds like a little shit to me.”

He didn’t want to outright ask if it was the same Billy. There could be plenty of Billy’s who went to Hawkins High. What did he know about popular boy names of high schoolers in the 80s. He wasn’t a walking, talking baby book of names. 

Benny let out of tiny, real chuckle, “Maybe, but he was polite as anything. Shook my hand, gave me his name. I think he tried to smile, but he didn’t look comfortable--but that doesn’t bother me a smidge.”

Hopper couldn’t help it and asked, “That come with a last name?”

“I didn’t think you were screening the names of my employees now,” Benny replied with a small, playful smile. 

“Just looking out for an old friend,” Hopper said, nerves in his voice making it a little flatter now. He couldn’t imagine the brave, prickly boy who’d saved them all flipping burgers in the back. He also couldn’t help his curiosity.

Benny was untroubled and direct, “A 17-year-old isn’t about to give me any trouble. Least of all Billy Hargrove.”

Hopper wasn’t quite sure why, but he chose not to react to Billy’s name. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to make trouble for the kid and have his friend watch a cop react visibly to his new fry cook’s name. Maybe he just didn’t feel like spreading Billy’s name around, even to a trusted friend. 

All he did was nod and say, “Glad to hear it, Benny, I’m glad to hear it.”

“Tell you what I’m not glad about,” Benny said as his brow furrowed and he dropped a newspaper on the table next to Hopper’s napkin. 

Splashed at the top was the the headline “BODY OF CASHIER FOUND IN ELYSIAN HAWK FOREST” and below it was a photograph of a big slumped _something_ covered in leaves and debris. The picture was grainy, but if you stared hard enough you could made out one sneaker with untied laces near the edge of the photo.

Hopper stared at it, remembering what the ruined corpse of Khalid Johnson looked like in person last night as he shined a flashlight in his anguished wide-eyed face, cradled by trash and leaves and covered in a sticky black liquid that was starting to color Hopper’s most awful memories as of late. 

“You and me both, pal,” Hopper said softly, staring at the headline and meeting Benny’s eyes and adding bitterly, “The nights ain’t gettin’ any shorter, that’s for sure.”


End file.
